Your loving Mama
Elizabeth folded the letter and placed it beneath the Shakespeare. Her hands did not shake much. Her breathing was almost even. The room had grown familiar around her—fire, table, stone, the smell of coal and ink and the faint mineral trace of his brass polish—and she sat inside these things and did not permit the letter to dismantle what she had built.
Jane was not dead.
She did not know this. She had no evidence of it. But the alternative—the alternative that Mama had accepted and Mrs Long had codified into neighbourhood fact and that everyone except Elizabeth had folded into the settled architecture of their grief—that alternative she would not carry. Not here. Not while she still possessed the distraction of a darkened lantern, and the sea kept its counsel, and twenty miles of coastline lay between this tower and the place where her sister had last been seen.
She tended the fire. She folded the letters she had written and sealed them with a drop of his candle wax, pressing her thumb into the soft surface because she had no seal of her own. She placed them at the edge of the table where she would remember to take them down to the village in the morning.
Then she lay down upon the cot and pulled the blanket to her shoulders and closed her eyes.
MrsHargreavescameupon the tenth day with a basket, a broom, and the expression of a woman who had been restraining herself for longer than her constitution permitted.
Elizabeth met her on the path. She had learned by now to intercept rather than receive—to be already walking, already in motion, already offering a question or an errand that might redirect whatever Mrs Hargreaves had been composing on the climb.
It did not work today.
“I’ve come to turn out the cottage,” Mrs Hargreaves announced, already bearing left at the fork. “The linens will want airing by now, and if the chimney’s still smoking, I’ll have a look at the draught myself. I’ve cleared worse flues than that one.”
“That is very kind, but there is no need. I have been managing.”
“Managing.” Mrs Hargreaves did not slow. “You’ve been managing without a working fire for ten days. You’re cooking at the tower—don’t think I haven’t seen the smoke from the keeper’s chimney at odd hours—and you come down each morning looking as though you’ve slept in a hedge. The place wants a proper cleaning, and I mean to give it one.”
Elizabeth lengthened her stride and drew alongside. The fork was twenty paces ahead. The cottage path lay to the left, its door wired shut behind a latch that would not survivea determined push, its interior a ruin of water and rubble that would end every fiction she had constructed in the past ten days.
“Mrs Hargreaves, I must ask you not to.”
The older woman stopped. “Not to what?”
“Not to go to the cottage. Not today.”
“Why on earth not?”
Because the chimney breast is shattered across the floor. Because the roof has opened and the water stands an inch deep. Because my trunk is a sodden wreck and my gowns are ruined and I have been sleeping on the keeper’s cot for nine nights running. Because if you open that door, you will see all of this, and you will march me down to the village, and the trustees will hear of it, and everything I have built here will collapse as thoroughly as the masonry.
“Because I have written to the trustees about the chimney repair,” Elizabeth said quickly, “and I do not wish anyone disturbing the cottage until the mason has assessed the damage. The flue may be structurally unsound. I would not forgive myself if you went in to clean it and something gave way.”
Mrs Hargreaves studied her with the unhurried suspicion of a woman who had raised four children and buried a husband and could smell an evasion the way a hound smells a fox. “Structurally unsound? Why, you oughtn't be in there yourself!”
“Oh, no, it is not a matter of safety so long as it is not disturbed, but I am certain that a cleaning such as you mean to administer would do it no good. The chimney smoked badly enough to suggest a crack in the breast. I am not a mason, and I will not have anyone touching the chimney until one has looked at it.”
“And in the meantime? You’re living up there without a fire for cooking, without clean linens, without so much as a—”
“I am managing. The tower has a hearth. The keeper permits me use of it during working hours, which is entirely appropriate given that the property is under my stewardship.” She took Mrs Hargreaves’ arm and turned her, firmly, back toward the tower path. “And I can push a broom about well enough on my own. What I need from you is not cleaning, Mrs Hargreaves. What I need is information.”
This was the lever that worked with Mrs Hargreaves—not deflection, but redirection toward something she valued more than tidying. Mrs Hargreaves knew things. She had been born knowing things, and she had spent sixty years accumulating more, and the prospect of being consulted was the one currency that could reliably purchase her cooperation.
“Nell Calder told me that Marian Hale never spent a night away from the headland,” Elizabeth said. “In thirty-one years. Is that true?”
Mrs Hargreaves allowed herself to be turned, though her eyes cut back toward the cottage path once more before she surrendered it. “True enough. My mother said the same. Marian slept in that cottage every night of her stewardship, excepting the three days she had the fever in ‘09, and even then, she had my mother carry her up to the tower on the worst night because she said the lantern needed her near.”
“Needed her near. Those were her words?”
“My mother’s words. Whether they were Marian’s, I couldn’t say.”
They walked toward the tower together. Elizabeth asked about Marian’s routines, her habits, her relationship with the keeper of her time. Mrs Hargreaves answered with the half-reluctant thoroughness of someone who disapproved of the questioner’s living arrangements but could not resist the questions themselves.
“There’s another matter,” Mrs Hargreaves said, when they had reached the tower door. She set the basket down and straightened. “Tom Calder says you were at the tower past dark three nights this week.”
