He looked at her as one looks at a person who has said something so outlandish that a second hearing might alter it. “No.”
“The lantern operates at night. If I am the steward of this light, my duty is here when the light should beburning.”
He crossed his arms. “Your duty does not require you to sleep in the quarters of an unmarried man.”
“My duty requires me to be present when the apparatus I have inherited is failing for reasons neither of us understands. Going down to the village every evening and climbing back up each morning is not presence. It is a performance of presence, and I will not conduct the stewardship as a performance.”
He pushed away from the wall. “Miss Bennet, you have been upon this headland half a day. You have no reputation here yet, which means you have everything to lose and nothing to recover if—”
“If what?”
He stared. Could she possibly be so naive? “If anyone learns you are sleeping in this tower!”
“Mytower, if you recall, and you are inmyemploy. Besides, I slept in this tower last night, and no harm came to me.”
“Last night was an emergency! Repeating it by choice is something else entirely, and you know that as well as I do.”
She did not retreat from it. She stood in the centre of his room—his room, his cot, his fire, his blanket around her shoulders—and met his objection with the composure of someone who had anticipated it before he opened his mouth.
“I am not a fool. I understand what the village would say. I understand what the trustees would say. But if I go down to sleep in Mrs Hargreaves’ son’s spare room every evening while the lantern stands dark, I am choosing my comfort and my reputation over the duty I accepted. And I did not come to Blackscar for either of those things.”
“You came to Blackscar to preserve the trust. The trust requires a steward above reproach, if I understand the instrument properly. A woman found to be lodging in a lighthouse with—”
“With a man who has shown me nothing but courtesy. Brusque courtesy, I grant you, but courtesy all the same.” Her voice did not soften, but something in it moved from argument to statement. “You gave me your blanket. You built up the fire. You carried me from the gallery floor without molesting me. And at no point—not in the dark, not in the storm, not when I was asleep and entirely in your power—was I unsafe.”
He did not know what to do with that. She had taken his own conduct—conduct that a gentleman could not have withheld from any woman in such circumstances withoutforfeiting his right to the title—and converted it into evidence for an argument he was trying to win. The logic was flawless. The manoeuvre was infuriating.
“That is not the point.”
“It ispreciselythe point. If I believed you were a danger to my person or my virtue, I would not propose this. I would have taken my chances with the storm last night rather than enter your door. I did not. And I would not think to remain unless I were certain—entirelycertain—that you understood the terms.”
He hissed in exasperation. “What terms, Miss Bennet?”
“That I am here as the steward, not a female. That this arrangement is necessity, not invitation. That whatever conclusions an outsider might draw, there is nothing between us but a shared obligation to a lantern that will not light and a coastline that cannot go unprotected.”
He turned from her. The fire had grown too warm through his clothing, and the room, which had accommodated one person without complaint for five years, had become intolerable in its closeness. He crossed to the door and opened it. The morning air struck his face—cold, clean, carrying the salt of the receding tide—and he stood in the doorway and breathed it until he could think clearly.
She was not asking his permission. She was informing him of what she intended, and she had constructed her case so that every objection he raised became another wall she could climb. If he refused on grounds of propriety, she would cite his own conduct as proof of safety. If he refused on practical grounds, she would cite her legal authority.
And if he refused outright, she could dismiss him. She had not said so. She did not need to.
“Mrs Hargreaves could stay here as well,” Miss Bennet said from behind him. “As chaperone. That is the conventional solution.”
He turned. “No.”
A faint acknowledgment tipped the corner of her mouth. “I agree. Mrs Hargreaves in this tower means Mrs Hargreaves watching you fail to light the lantern every night. And her presence alone would not be sufficient to protect my reputation, in any case. So long as everyone believes I am established in my own household, the legal arrangement of steward and keeper is sufficient.”
He regarded her a little more warily now. She had come to Blackscar already armed with intelligence, if not common sense. And far too much stubbornness. The woman standing in his quarters was not a London girl playing at authority. She was an adversaryof a kind he had not encountered since the life he had left behind, and she had been operating at that level since before her carriage crested the hill.
“And you are wrong that I have everything to lose. The matter is quite the opposite,” she said. The words came without performance, without the potency she had given to the rest. A plain accounting, offered to the air between them as though it were simply what remained after everything else had been stripped away.
He did not know what she meant by it—what she had lost, what she had left behind, what calculus of diminished prospects had brought a woman of her bearing to a cliff in Northumberland. He did not ask. It was not his concern.
“I will keep to the lower room. You will keep to the gallery and the stair. During the day, I will be visible on the headland and in the village, conducting the business of the trust. I will manage Mrs Hargreaves. I will manage the path. I will manage whatever story is required.”
“And if the story fails?”
“Then the scandal falls upon me. Not upon you. My reputation. My consequence. My risk.” She met his gaze with the same unsparing directness she had brought to the gallery the night before, when she had looked at the dark lens and told him the lantern was her charge. “You are the keeper. You live here. No one questions your presence. It is only mine that requires justification, and I have documents to support that.”
