“Holt will not trouble us for another hour.”
“Holt is retiring. The new man arrives in an hour. And the children are—”
“Jane is perfectly capable of managing them, as she has been managing them all week while you and I pretend we are here to oversee the lighthouse and not to escape the obligations of a Derbyshire summer.”
She kissed his throat. He exhaled. His hands came to her waist, then abandoned cloth for skin as he captured her cheeks to bring her mouth to his.
“Your hands are not as rough as they were,” she murmured against his skin.
“I have not trimmed a wick in twelve years.”
“I know. I miss the calluses.”
“You miss a great many impractical things.”
“I do.” She kissed the hollow of his throat again. His arms fell around her and tightened. “But these still feel exactly right.”
They stood together in the small bedroom. The cottage had been repaired, improved, furnished with things that had no business on a Northumberland cliff—good linen, a proper bed, shelves for the books she could not travel without, a writing desk by the window where she could see the tower and the sea.
It was not Pemberley. It was not meant to be. It was the place where they had learned to live again, and they returned to it every summer, when the gulls were thick on the water, and the shore stretched out past the reef, and one could see for miles across the islands, exactly as he had promised her the night the lantern came back to life.
“How long did you say we have before we are invaded?” Darcy asked.
“An hour before Mr Ashworth arrives. And Jane promised not to bring the children up the hill before ten.”
“And you believe that promise will hold against the combined will of our children and a headland they have claimed as their sovereign territory?”
“I believe Jane is formidable. I also believe Mrs Hargreaves will have fed them so thoroughly that they will be too heavy to climb the track.”
At that very instant, the cottage door banged open. George and Ellie Rose tumbled through it in a tangle of windblown hair and sandy boots and the righteous fury of siblingswho had been wronged by each other in ways too numerous and too grave to wait for adult adjudication.
Behind them, Jane appeared in the doorway, slightly out of breath, with Small Jane on her hip and the composed expression of a woman who had survived the sea and was not going to be defeated by a dispute over a wooden horse. It appeared that she had perhaps underestimated the speed at which small legs could cover the distance between the village and the headland when properly motivated.
“They are a full hour early,” Elizabeth said with a laugh.
“Mrs Hargreaves gave them seed cake,” Jane said, as though this explained everything, which it did. She passed the toddler to Elizabeth, but Small Jane, at three years old, was already straining to follow her older siblings back outside. Elizabeth kissed her cheek and set her free.
Darcy kissed her forehead. She retied his cravat—no better than before, possibly worse—and they went to the door to meet the chaos that three children and a July morning and a headland full of wind and possibility had brought to them.
Themorningwaslongand full. The older two had breached the tower stair within an hour of their arrival three days ago and had since claimed it as their personal territory, racing each other to the gallery and back with the tireless, heedless energy of children who did not understand that stone steps were not designed for running and would not understand it until one of them fell, which Elizabeth fully expected to happen before the week was out.
They had tried to reach the lantern apparatus itself, but Holt—patient, tolerant after twelve years at Blackscar now, and unshakeable in his authority over the machinery—had caught them at the rail and explained, with the gravity of a man addressing junior officers, that the lens was not a toy and that anyone who touched it without permission would answer to him personally and also to their mother, who was, in his considered opinion, the more formidable consequence of the two.
Elizabeth liked Holt. She had liked him from the first morning, when he stood in the gallery and saidRight, then.He had turned to the apparatus and never faltered once in twelve years. He had kept the logbook without interruption and with a meticulousness that rivaled even Darcy's. Not a single outage. Not a single unexplained failure.The flame burned every night from dusk to dawn, and the beam swept the channel, and the coast was lit, and the vessels came safe to harbour.
Whether this was because Holt was an excellent keeper—which he was—or because the covenant that had almost died had been fulfilled so that the flame no longer required anything but oil and wick and steady hands—which it had—was a question Elizabeth had stopped trying to answer.
The logbook told the truth. That was enough.
She found her husband on the headland after lunch, standing at the cliff edge with his hands in his coat pockets and his face turned toward the Farne line. He still stood there. Every visit, the same place, the same posture, looking out at the same water as though confirming that the sea was still where he had left it. She came up beside him and slipped her arm through his. His hand found hers inside his pocket, and her fingers brushed the stone—still there, black, sea-worn, the vein of white quartz smooth from twelve years of his thumb wearing the same path across its surface.
“You still carry it.”
“I have not parted with it since you gave it to me.”
The same answer. The same words, given twelve years ago on a beach below this cliff when she found it in his pocket and he confessed it with the shy pride of a man whose private devotion had been discovered.
She leaned against his arm. The July sun was warm on the headland. The sea was blue, truly blue, not the grey she had known through all those winter months but the deep, clear blue of a northern summer, and the islands stood out sharp and green against it. The shore below was long and white and empty, and the beauty of the place—which she had never seen in her first year because her first year had been storm and grief and a flame she could not keep burning—took her breath every July, as though the coast were showing her the version of itself it had been saving.
