He looked down at himself. She had a point. His shirt was untucked. His braces hung at his sides. His hair was beyond salvage.
“Just one pirate, but she was formidable.” He tucked the shirt, pulled the braces over his shoulders, and ran a hand through his hair with a result that improved nothing.
“Better?”
“Worse, if anything. You had best pray he does not have his glass, but you know he will. He is probably waiting to see how late you rise, and means to tell everyone.”
He leaned down and kissed her—slowly, thoroughly, with the full intention of ravishing her body and soul and marking his place.
“That last bit was your fault. Wait for me,” he said against her mouth. “Right here. I will not be long.”
“Go and tend your flame, keeper.”
He went. The morning air hit him at the cottage door, cold and salt-sharp, carrying the cry of gulls and the sound of the harbour waking below. The path between the cottage and the tower was twenty yards of bare stone, swept clean by the wind, worn smooth by the boots of every keeper and every steward who had walked it since the first flame was struck two centuries ago. He walked it now with the ease of a man who could have walked it blind, feeling the familiar grade beneath his soles, the slight leftward cant where the rock dipped toward the cliff edge, the place where the stone was always damp from the spray that reached the headland at high tide.
The tower door was unlocked. He climbed the stair. The coil of it was in his legs—the rhythm of the ascent, the place where the third step was shorter than the rest, the landing where the draught changed direction, the final turn before the gallery opened above him in its circle of glass and brass and light.
The flame was still burning from the night’s watch, gold and thick. He stood before it, watching it do what it had done all night—hold the coast, guide the vessels, keep the dark at bay. Then he lowered the wick. The flame thinned, shrank, and died, and the gallery went quiet in the way it only went quiet in the morning, when the work of the night was finished, and the apparatus rested.
He cleaned the glass chimney, still warm from the burn. He trimmed the wick for the evening’s lighting, cutting it even, careful not to take too much. He checked the reservoir and refilled it from the oil store, pouring with the steady hand of long practice, wiping the lip of the can before replacing the cap. He polished the brass housing with the cloth he kept on the iron table, working in the old pattern—clockwise, upper fittings first, then lower, then the base where salt collected in the seams. He checked every joint, every seal, every pane of glass in its iron frame.
His hands knew the work. They had known it for five years before Elizabeth came and would know it for the rest of his life, whether he stood in this gallery or not. The keeping was in his body. It would not leave.
He looked around the gallery. The lenses, tall and faceted, clouded faintly at their edges where age had etched its claim. The brass bands dark with years of polish. The glass panes, each one replaced and sealed by his own hands at one time or another, each one holding back the wind that never stopped testing the seams.
He paused one last time to take in the view—the sea, the reef, the Farne line, the coast stretching north and south in its long, ragged certainty. He had stood here in every weather and every season and every hour of the day and night. He had watched storms build from nothing and break against the headland with a violence that shook the stone beneath his feet. He had watched calm seas lie so flat and silver that the beam seemed to slide across glass. He had watched the dawn come up over the water a thousand times, and it had never looked the same twice, and it had always, in every version, been the most honest thing he knew.
He opened the logbook and turned to a fresh page. He took the pen fromits holder.
April 14, 1813. Flame extinguished at dawn. Apparatus cleaned and prepared for evening light. Oil level adequate. Wick trimmed and in good condition. All fittings sound. Final entry of the present keeper.—F. Darcy
He set the pen down and closed the book. He rested his hand on the cover the way one rests a hand on the shoulder of a friend before parting, and then he descended the stair, stepped out into the morning and walked back along the stone path to the cottage.
She was dressed. Standing at the small mirror beside the window with her arms raised, pinning up her hair with the swift, practised movements of a woman who had been managing without a maid for seven months and intended no sympathy on the subject. The light from the window caught the fabric and the pins in her hair, and the smooth ring on her finger as her hands worked.
He came up behind her and set his hands on her waist, bent his head, and pressed his mouth to the nape of her neck, where the hair was still loose, and the skin was warm, and the scent of lavender water had faded to something that was simply her.
“You did not wait for me,” he murmured against her neck. “I asked you to wait. In bed. Specifically.”
She tilted her head to give him better access, which was both a concession and a provocation, and turned to catch his mouth with hers. The kiss was brief, warm, domestic—the kiss of a wife, which was a word he could think now without his throat closing around it. A word that had become ordinary in the space of a single day and night and morning, and the ordinariness of it was the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him.
“The new keeper arrives today,” she reminded him.
“I know.”
“Mr Holt. From Whitby. Sixteen years’ service.”
“I remember.”
“Then you remember we ought to be ready to receive him. To show him the tower, the apparatus, the logbook. The oil stores and the spare wicks and the way the draught changes on the landing—”
He kissed her again. Not briefly this time. She stopped talking, which was the intended effect and also the most pleasant way he had yet discovered of achieving it. When hereleased her, she looked at him with bright eyes and disordered pins and the expression of a woman who had lost her train of thought and did not mind the losing.
“We will be ready,” he said. “I have already written the final entry.”
She touched his face. Her fingertips traced the line of his jaw, the gesture she had begun in the weeks since his return and which she performed now with the unselfconscious ease of a woman who had accepted that touching him was among her rights and intended to exercise it freely. “Was it very hard? Writing the last one?”
“No.” He covered her hand with his. “The log belongs to the tower. The keeping belongs to us. Those are not the same thing.”
