She slipped her eyes towards the corner. “Thank you.”
She did not sit. She wrung the edge of her cloak over the flags and hung it upon the peg beside the door, her movements confident despite the tremor in her hands. She unlaced her boots and set them on their sides before the grate. The books she arranged at the far edge of his table, spines aligned, as though even in extremity she would not presume upon his territory more than survival required.
He watched these small acts of order and turned away from them. She was methodical. She was shaking and soaked and displaced, and she was still arranging her boots by the fire with the deliberation of someone who kept her surroundings in hand because the alternative was to let something else slip. It meant nothing. It was a habit, not a quality, and he would not credit it as one.
“I should know what to call you,” she said.
He frowned. “Why?”
“Well, I cannotaddress you as ‘sir’ indefinitely.” She sat upon the settle at last, drawing her stockinged feet beneath her and pulling the blanket close. “And I willnotcall you ‘Wickie.’”
Something tightened along his jaw. “No.”
“No?” She waited. When he offered nothing further, she narrowed her eyes. “Ah. You dislike the name.”
“I have never troubled to correct it.”
“That is not the same thing.”
Her attention pressed against the room the way a change in wind presses against a sail—not visible, but the whole structure leaning under it. She was watching him with the careful, unhurried interest of someone accustomed to reading what others preferred to leave unwritten.
“When I first came, some in the village called me ‘Lantern Will.’”
“Lantern Will.” She turned it over as one might examine a coin of uncertain provenance. “Is that your name, then? William?”
“It will serve.”
“Will it? Or is it merely what you permit?”
He did not answer. The fire had reached the larger coal now and burned with more authority, throwing his shadow long against the far wall. The warmth reached his shins, though the rest of him remained cold.
He ought to climb the stair. The mechanism waited. The dead lens waited. The sea drove ships past his darkened tower, and there was nothing above but failure, and nothing below but a woman who asked questions with the quiet persistence of water finding a crack in stone.
“Your speech is not what I expected of a lighthouse keeper,” she said as he began to turn away.
He paused and studied her more carefully. “I cannot account for your expectations.”
Her brows rose faintly, and when she did that, she looked almost innocent. Unthreatening, though she was quite the opposite. “You sound as though you might have studied somewhere rather better than a fishing village.”
He set his boot upon the first step and rested his hand upon the rail. “You will find coal in the bucket beside the hearth. The privy is outside the door, twenty paces east. I would not recommend it in this weather.” He paused, and when he spoke again, the register ofhis voice had changed—lower, stripped of the civil detachment that had governed the rest. “Do not ascend the stair.”
“Why?”
The question stopped him where a command would not have. He turned, one step above the floor, and the additional height set him looking down at her for the first time. She sat with the blanket gathered to her throat, her face lit on one side by the fire and shadowed on the other.
Whatever else she was—cold, shaking, soaked through, furious at the cottage and the chimney and the trustees and perhaps at him—she was looking up at him without flinching. Her hands gripped the blanket, not herself.
“The lantern room requires exact attention,” he said. “I cannot work with someone troubling me with questions and conversation.”
“Then I shall not speak.”
“Miss Bennet.”
“I am merely asking why.”
“And I have answered. Do not ascend.”
He held her gaze one breath longer than he intended, then turned and mounted the stair. The stone closed about him as he climbed, and the sound of the storm swelled—rain driving against the glass above, wind testing the gallery railing, the tower itself humming with a low vibration that he knew as well as his own breathing.
