She descended the stair without waiting for his reply.
He stood alone in the lantern room, the collar in his hand. The glass threw pale light across the floor from a sun that would set in six hours. After which the tower would be dark again, and the pyre would burn again, and thirty days would become twenty-nine.
The collar sat in his palm, warm from his grip. Without flaw. Without play. Without the smallest imperfection to justify the lie two people had now staked their futures on.
He set it into the housing, and it seated true, and the silence of the chamber gave him nothing.
He could not mend what was not broken. And he could not explain what was not broken to a woman who had just lied to a harbour warden on his behalf and would expect, by morning, to understand why the lie had been necessary.
Chapter Eleven
Thewesttrackwasworse than she had judged from the window.
In the dark before dawn, with the mist sitting low on the headland and the grass still sodden from the storm, the path dropped steeply along the shoulder of the hill, following a sheep trail cut into the slope by generations of animals with a surer footing than hers. Twice she lost the track where the ground fell away into loose scree, and once her boot found nothing beneath it for a terrible half-second before the earth returned.
She wore the same gown, stiff and faintly sour from the rain and from sleeping in it for two nights. Her cloak was still a ruin on the cottage floor, so the wind took the warmth from her without obstacle.
By the time she reached the lower ground where the track met the broader path along the harbour, her hands were numb and her hem was black with mud. She stopped where the two paths converged and looked back up the hill.
The tower stood against the paling sky, its column dark, its gallery windows catching the first grey light without returning it. No beam swept the water. No lamp burned behind the glass. It was an absence so large it seemed to have substance—a hole in the coastline where something essential had been removed.
She turned toward the village, walked two hundred yards along the harbour road until she reached the well at its southern edge, and then turned back.
The eastern path rose gently from the village, wide enough for a cart, visible from the harbour and from any boat at anchor below. She climbed it at a pace that suggested purpose without urgency—a steward about her morning rounds, nothing more. The harbour lay to her left, its water flat and grey in the early light. Two fishing boats sat at their moorings. A third was already moving toward the mouth, its sail dark against the mist.
Halfway up, she passed a boy driving a goat along the verge. He looked at her with frank curiosity. “Morning, miss.”
“Good morning.” She smiled widely at him.
“You’re the one from the tower?”
“I am the steward, yes.”
He considered this. The goat pulled at its tether. “Da’ says the light’s out.”
She nodded with what she hoped was sufficient warmth to satisfy a child without inviting further questions. “It is. The light is being repaired.”
“Da’ says Wickie’s gone queer.”
“Your father is mistaken. The keeper is managing the situation with considerable skill.” She nodded to the boy and continued up the hill before the conversation could develop further.
The tower door was shut when she reached it. She pushed it open and stepped inside.
He was not in the lower room. The fire burned low in the grate—he had tended it at some point during the hour she had been gone—and the cot bore the impression of where she had lain. Her books remained on the table. His logbook was open to a fresh page, the ink still damp, and she looked at the entry for precisely as long as it took to confirm she could not read his hand at this angle, which was not quite long enough to constitute a violation of the promise she had made to herself not to invade his privacy.
His boots sounded on the stair. She counted not his footfalls, which the stone swallowed, but the change in the air as someone descended from the colder upper reaches into the warmth below. He emerged from the stairwell with his coat over his arm and stopped when he saw her.
“You were seen?” he said.
“By a boy with a goat, who informed me that his father thinks you’ve gone queer.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It did not survive long enough to be classified. “That would be Peter, Calder’s youngest. He tells everyone everything.”
“Then he has told himself and will soon tell others that the steward walks up from the cottage each morning before breakfast. That is all to the good.”
She moved to the hearth and crouched before it, feeding the fire with coal from the bucket. “I will go down to the village this morning. Mrs Hargreaves will expect me. I need provisions, and I need to be seen doing ordinary things in ordinary places.”
He said nothing.
