She remained at the top of the stair, where the wall offered something to lean against. The wind made the glass shudder. The great lens threw fractured shadows across the floor in the light of his hand-lantern, and the brass fittings gleamed where he had polished them to a lustre that bordered on devotion.
“How long has it been out?”
His hand stilled upon the housing. “You will return below.”
“How long?”
He turned then. In the hand-lantern’s glow, his face was harder than it had been by the fire downstairs. The lines beside his mouth had deepened, and his eyes—dark, too quick for a man who cultivated stillness—moved across her face with an expression that closed itself before she could read it.
“Since before your arrival.”
The storm raged on the same. The glass rattled the same. The dark held the same. But the man before her rearranged entirely in the span of those four words.
He had known. When Mrs Hargreaves introduced her at the cottage. When she had argued with him about the roof and the chimney and the coal. When he had offered her provisions and told her where the privy was and forbidden her the stair. He had known, the entire time, that the lantern was dead, and he had not said a word.
“I arrived only today, so that tells me nothing. How many nights?”
“Enough.”
“Enough to spend all day hauling driftwood up from the beach to build a bonfire on the headland as a substitute?”
He did not confirm it. He struck the flint instead. The spark leapt; the wick caught; the flame rose with a clarity that made her draw breath. For three seconds—she counted—it burned clean and strong, and the great lens gathered the light and threw it outward in a pale sweep across the glass.
Then it narrowed, thinned, and withdrew into nothing.
She had not been prepared for that. The mechanism swallowing its own flame. The lens going dark in an instant, as though the light had been pulled backward into the brass by some force that operated beneath the level of explanation. The hand-lantern on the floor cast its small, inadequate glow across the housing, and the tower settled into its darkness with the weight of something long accustomed to it.
“There is no draught interfering,” she said.
“No.”
“The oil is fresh? Oil can be spoiled, you know.”
“Yes.” The word emerged as a hiss through gritted teeth.
“And the wick?”
There was a restrained sigh. “Trimmed within the hour.”
Elizabeth stood back and crossed her arms. She was not asking because she thought she had the answers. She was asking because she needed to know whether what she had inherited was a lighthouse with a mechanical fault or a lighthouse with an incompetent keeper, and the answers he gave would determine which conclusion she drew. He knew it. She could see it in the way he held himself—each reply stripped to its minimum, as though every word were evidence that might be used against him.
“Then what is wrong with it?”
He set the flint down beside the taper with a care that contradicted the sharpness in his voice. “If Iknew, Miss Bennet, do you suppose I would be standing here in the dark?”
The wind drove rain against the gallery windows. Somewhere far below, the sea struck the cliff, and the tower carried the impact upward through the stone to the soles of her feet.
She crossed the room. He drew himself inward—not a step backward, but a gathering of the shoulders, a tightening along the arms that told her more than any answerhe had given. He did not want her near the apparatus. Whether from protectiveness of the mechanism or protectiveness of himself, she could not determine. She stopped two paces from the housing.
The lens rose above her, enormous at this distance. The brass bands bore the evidence of years of salt and polish. The wick sat black and trimmed in its cradle, perfectly intact.
She reached toward the collar.
His hand closed over the brass before hers arrived. Not upon her—he did not touch her—but upon the metal itself, covering the place her fingers would have met. The gesture was swift and instantly governed.
“The housing is delicate,” he said. “It requires careful handling.”
“I was not going to dismantle it. I was going to look at it.”
