“But I have no—there is nothing. There is no time between! I was in the water and then I was on the shore, and there is nothing in between. Nothing at all!” Her voice had risen. Her eyes were too wide. “Where was I?”
“I do not know.” Elizabeth held on. “None of us knows. We searched for you, Jane. The whole coast. Every village, every harbour, every—” Her voice broke. She mended it. “We could not find you. A body was recovered near Longhoughton, and I was told it might be yours. I have a grave I was going to visit.” She pressed Jane’s hands harder. “But you are here. You are sitting in this chair drinking my tea, and I do not care where you were or how long it has been or what explanation there is or is not, because you are here, and you are alive, and that is the only thing that matters to me.”
Something moved across Jane’s face—the ghost of a smile, the first one, tentative and bewildered and entirely Jane. “I am solid, Lizzy. I am very cold and very hungry, and I have no idea where my shoes are.”
Elizabeth sputtered a tearful laugh and pressed her sister’s hands to her own face, then held them there against her cheeks. The hands were cold and real and present, and the fire crackled, but she was alive. Elizabeth tugged her sister closer, wrapping her in her arms at last, and looked past William out the window. The tower stood above them on the headland with its flame dark and its duty done and its final debt paid.
“Before we worry about your shoes, you shall have more tea,” Elizabeth said. “And more bread and a fresh gown, and when you are warm enough, I shall introduce you to the man over there, who is going to be your brother, and who carried you up a cliff path this morning without complaint, which is more than I have managed to extract from him in six months of acquaintance.”
Jane looked at Darcy. He inclined his head—a small, grave bow. “Your sister has spoken of you a great deal, Miss Bennet. I am very glad to meet you at last.”
Jane smiled shyly at Darcy, and Elizabeth squeezed her sister’s hands. Something passed between them that required no words—the shared language of sisters who had grown up in the same house and read the same books and slept in the same bed and survived the same losses. A language that a year and a half of absence and the whole improbable machinery of covenant and sea had failed to erase.
“He is very serious,” Jane said.
“He is,” Elizabeth said. “You will grow accustomed to it.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Thelightcamethroughthe curtains in a long gold shaft and laid itself across the bed like a hand. He watched it travel. It found her shoulder first—bare, warm, the skin there still faintly flushed from sleep—and moved along her collarbone and up the curve of her neck to the place where her hair had come loose in the night. The hair spread across the pillow in dark tangles that smelled of salt and soap and the lavender water Nell Calder had pressed into her hands the morning before the wedding with the quiet instruction that a bride ought to smell of something besides brass polish.
She was on her side, facing him. Her breathing was slow and even, and her lips were slightly parted. One hand rested on the sheet between them, palm up, the fingers loosely curled. The ring was there. Plain gold, purchased from the jeweller in Alnwick three weeks ago while the banns were being read. Darcy had fitted it to her hand yesterday afternoon in the small stone church at the bottom of the hill, and kissed it into place to seal his troth.
Georgiana and Richard had sat in the front pew. The Gardiners had sat opposite. Kitty wept, and Mary held Kitty’s hand with a grip that could have moored a boat. And Jane—Jane stood beside her sister in a shawl around her thin shoulders, her blue eyes shining, her hand resting on Elizabeth’s arm as though she feared that letting go might return her to whatever place the sea had kept her.
She should not have been standing anywhere. She should have been a memory, a sorrow, but instead, she was… a mending. Physical evidence of an oath kept, and she stood witness to a union the covenant had been waiting two hundred years to see.
He did not wish to move. The cottage bedroom was warm—the chimney he had repaired in December drawing properly at last, the fire banked low from the night before, the air holding the stillness of a room in which two people had slept deeply and well after a day that asked everything of them.
The bed was a real bed, the one that had been in the cottage since before the roof collapsed, restored now with new linens and the quilt Mrs Hargreaves had produced from somewhere without explanation or sentiment. It was not a large bed. It did not need to be. They had spent the night in it the way they had spent the night in the gallery three weeks earlier—close, tangled, unwilling to cede an inch of proximity to anything as trivial as comfort.
The light moved further across the bed. It reached her face. Her eyelids tightened, and she turned her head into the pillow with a small sound of protest, and the turning exposed the full length of her neck and the place where his mouth had been the night before. It was still so close and so vivid that the sight of that skin in the morning light sent a current through him that made the necessity of leaving the bed feel like a cruelty designed by the same God who had designed the tides.
But the dawn was here. The flame needed dousing, the apparatus needed cleaning, and this was his last watch.
He eased himself upright. The sheets whispered against bare skin. Her hand, the one with the ring, twitched on the pillow but did not close. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for his shirt, which was on the floor where it had landed the previous evening with a haste that he could not, in the honest light of morning, regret.
Her fingers caught his wrist. “No.”
“The flame needs putting out. Dawn is here.”
“Dawn can wait.”
“Dawn has never once waited for anyone, in my experience. And you know what will be said when everyone looks up this hill and sees that lantern still burning at midday.”
She had not opened her eyes. Her hair was across her face, and her shift had slipped from one shoulder in a way that made any talk of dawn and duty seem profoundly beside the point.
“Elizabeth—”
“Come back to bed, William.”
He came back to bed. Dawn did not wait, but he made it wait regardless, and when he finally sat up again—flushed, disordered, with her laughter still warm against his throat—the sun had cleared the horizon and the morning was fully arrived. And the flame was still burning in the gallery above the headland, patient, steady, wasting oil it no longer needed to burn.
Hedressed. Not the London clothes—those had been packed away, all except the coat, which had been so thoroughly ruined by the gallery floor and the road and the sodden rescue on the beach that Perkins had looked at it with the expression of a man attending a funeral and had folded it into the bottom of the trunk with a silence that spoke louder than eulogy.
He sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his boots, and she rolled onto her back and looked at him with one arm behind her head, and the sheet pooled at her waist. That smile that was not the wry, defended smile he had come to know in September but something newer, something that had room in it and warmth and the laziness of a woman who had nowhere to be and no one to defend herself against.
“If you walk to the tower like that,” she said, “Calder will see your flapping shirtsleeves and slovenly breeches all the way from the harbour. He will assume the keeper has been overcome by pirates.”
