“Speculated?” Mrs Hargreaves snorted. “Wickie says the same thing every time: mechanical fault, repairs underway. If Wickie says it, it must be so, so everyone says.” Mrs Hargreaves’ voice dropped half a register. “Except for Robson. He’s a blacksmith, Miss Bennet. He knows machinery. He looked at it and he said there was nothing wrong with it that he could find.”
Anne set down another plate before Elizabeth. “That’s no good, if nothing’s broken and it still won’t burn.”
Elizabeth held the older woman’s gaze. The information arranged itself alongside what she had seen in the gallery—the flame rising clean and strong and then withdrawing, the wick sound, the oil fresh, the brass warm where his hands had worked it—and the distance between what the village feared and what she knew contracted to almost nothing.
“Well. As you said, the keeper knows his business, but I will look into it,” she said.
Mrs Hargreaves snorted. “What’ll you do that Wickie hasn’t?”
“I don’t know yet. But the steward’s charge includes not only the endowment, but the apparatus, and I intend to either understand it or find someone more qualified who does.” She rose from the table. “Thank you for breakfast. And for the tea—I should be very grateful for a supply of my own, if it can be arranged.”
“I’ll send a tin up with the lad.”
“You are very kind.”
She paused at the door. “Mrs Hargreaves? The stewards before me—Marian Hale and Prudence Gardiner. Is there anyone alive who knew them? Anyone who might remember details of how the trust was conducted?”
Mrs Hargreaves considered. “Old Nell Calder. Tom’s grandmother. She’s past eighty and sharp as a gutting knife. Lives above the chandler’s.”
“I should like to visit her.”
“She’ll talk your ear off.”
Elizabeth grinned. “I am counting on it.”
She gathered the provisions Mrs Hargreaves had assembled—bread, cheese, a small crock of butter, six eggs wrapped in straw, and a twist of salt in brown paper—and loaded them into the basket Anne produced from behind the kitchen door. The basket was heavy. She would carry it up the western path, in full view of the harbour, and anyone who watched would see a steward provisioning her cottage for the day.
Theclimbbackupwas harder with the basket.
She took the eastern path at a steady pace, conscious of the harbour below and the boats at their moorings and the possibility that anyfigure at any window might be watching the new steward ascend to her charge. The basket handle bit into her palm. The eggs shifted with each step. She concentrated on the ground and on the shape of the story she was maintaining—steward provisions the cottage, steward attends the property, steward conducts herself with the sober industry appropriate to a woman of responsibility and no particular interest to gossips.
The tower appeared over the rise, and she saw him on the knoll.
He had rebuilt the pyre. The stack stood higher than yesterday’s—fresh timber hauled from the beach and arranged with the same methodical care. He worked with his back to the path, his coat off, his sleeves above the elbow. The wind caught his hair and drove it across his brow; he did not push it back.
She carried the basket to the tower door, set it inside, and returned to the headland.
“The lantern has never failed before,” she said.
He straightened from the timber. His forearms were streaked with salt and sand, and she realised all too late that her eyes had drifted to them. She snatched her gaze back to his face.
“Mrs Hargreaves says it has burned every night since before her mother’s time. Ordered dark during the wars, but never a failure. Not once.”
He looked at her. His jaw tightened, and his hands went still on the timber—the only signs that the confirmation had landed somewhere he had been bracing against. He did not lay it down for her. He absorbed it and returned to the stack.
“Robson told the village there’s nothing wrong with the mechanism,” she continued. “They are frightened. TheHannah Crowenearly struck the northern spur. A cable’s length, they said. But you know this already.”
“I know it.”
“Then you know that we cannot spend Tull’s thirty days repeating what has already failed. If the mechanism is sound and the flame will not hold, then the cause lies elsewhere. And we must look elsewhere.”
He drove a length of timber into the stack with the flat of his hand. “Where? You have been here a day and a half, Miss Bennet. You do not know this apparatus. You do not know this coast. I have spent five years learning both, and I have foundnothingthat accounts for the failure!”
“Five years is a long time to learn a lantern. Where were you trained?”
The timber in his hand went still. “I was not trained for this post specifically.”
She tilted her head. “For what, then?”
