“I am not ready to answer that,” she said. “I need to read more.”
“You need to read more, or you need to decide how much to tell me?”
She turned, and her expression was unguarded for the first time since the night he had carried her down the stair—a flash of something caught between frustration and an honesty she had not intended to show.
“Both,” she said. “And I will not apologise for that. You have kept the cause of the lantern’s failure from the village, from Tull, and you would have kept it from me if you could have. You invented a brass collar to explain what you cannot explain. I am withholding a half-formed theory until I understand it well enough to defend it. If there is a difference between those two deceptions, I confess I cannot find it.”
She took the eggs from the basket, one by one, and set them in the bowl beside the hearth. Her hands were brisk—confident. If this was the first period of her life when she had been required to cook for herself, he would never have guessed it.
Her back was to him. And the silence that filled the tower was not peace but the charged quiet of two people who had just drawn blood and were deciding whether to press the wound or walk away from it.
He picked up the rope. She picked up the journal. And neither of them spoke for three hours.
Chapter Thirteen
Shewrotetheletterson the ninth evening, after he had climbed the stair and the gallery had swallowed him for the night.
The fire burned low. She sat at his table with his pen in her hand and his ink in the well and a candle borrowed from the shelf above the cot, and she divided her family into two pages, because her family had divided itself long before she left it.
The first was for Meryton. For Mama and Lydia, and the Philipses, who would be reading over their shoulders. She wrote carefully. She described the headland in terms that would occupy Mama’s attention without alarming her: the village, the harbour, the quality of the local bread, the kindness of Mrs Hargreaves. She mentioned the tower only as property she was learning to manage. She mentioned the keeper not at all.
And she did not mention the lantern.
She wrote that she was well, that the air agreed with her, that the coastal walks were invigorating, and that she had every confidence the trust would be brought to good order within due season. She signed it with love and set it aside to dry.
The second letter was harder.
She wrote to Uncle Gardiner first, because the practical matters belonged to him: the state of the cottage, which she described as requiring chimney repair and roof work, without specifying the scale of the damage. The need for mason’s funds to be released through the trust. The condition of the endowment, which she had not yet been permitted to examine, but which she intended to pursue through the trustees directly. She asked him to write to Mr Rotherdam at Lincoln’s Inn and request a full accounting of the trust’s finances since the stewardship had lapsed.
Then she turned the page and wrote to Mary and Kitty together, because they had become, in the months since Papa’s death and Jane’s disappearance, the steadiest ground she had.
The headland is as wild as anything in the novels Mary refuses to read, and Kitty devours by the armful. The village is small and suspicious of strangers, which I respect, as I am suspicious of strangers myself and have been one for some time now. The keeper is a man of few words and fewer courtesies, which suits me admirably, as I have had my fill of both.
She paused. The candle guttered in a draught from the stair. Above her, the stone carried nothing—no sound, no vibration, only the knowledge that somewhere in the dark above, a very stubborn man was striking flint against steel and failing and striking again.
I have found a previous steward’s journal. Miss Hale was a remarkable woman, and I think Mary would admire her very much. She kept this light for thirty-one years and recorded everything she observed with a rigour that would satisfy even Mary’s standards of evidence. I am reading it slowly, because I suspect what it contains will matter a great deal, and I do not wish to arrive at conclusions before the evidence permits them.
Kitty, tell Aunt Gardiner the tea here could strip the varnish from a sideboard. She will know what to send.
She set the pen down and flexed her hand. The ink was drying on the page, and the room was very quiet, and the fire had sunk to a bed of ember that would need tending before she slept.
Mama’s last letter sat unopened in the pile Mrs Hargreaves had brought up three days ago. She had read the others—Uncle Gardiner’s brief, businesslike note confirming receipt of her arrival; Mary’s single page of careful questions about the trust’s legal structure; Kitty’s three pages of gossip, London observations, and a postscript asking whether there were any handsome men in Northumberland, underlined twice.
She had not opened Mama’s. She should have, before she wrote, but she knew already what it would say, and had not the strength before.
She picked it up now. The hand on the outside was her mother's looping, agitated script, the ink pressed deep where emotion had driven the pen. She broke the seal.
My dearest Lizzy,
I cannot sleep for thinking of you upon that dreadful coast. Twenty miles! You are scarcely twenty miles from the place where your sister was taken from us, and I cannot fathom why my brother permitted you to go, nor why you should wish to place yourself in the very jaws of the same cruel waters that swallowed my Jane.
She set the letter down to take a moment, force air into her lungs. Picked it up again.
Your father would never have allowed it. But your father is gone, and no one listens to me, and I am left here with only Lydia for company, and Lydia is no comfort, for she talks of nothing but officers and lace, and I am quite alone in my suffering. Mrs Long called yesterday and said she supposed you had gone to recover your sister’s body, which I thought very unkind, and I told her so, and she has not been back, which is the only mercy I have received this twelvemonth.
Lydia sends her love, though she does not say so. She is angry with you for leaving, which she expresses by refusing to speak of you at all, which is how I know she is angry, because Lydia never stops speaking of anything unless the thing has hurt her.
Please come home. There is nothing upon that coast but grief and cold water, and I could not bear to lose another daughter to it.
