“Yoursteward,” he repeated, savouring it.
Hurst set the wrapped candles beside the ledger. “Oil up by four. Candles now. Anything else?”
“No.”
He saw the account settled and left without looking at any of them. The harbour was still busy—the unloading continued, the children still chased the dog, and Robson’s hammer still rang from behind the net shed. The village conducted itself around him with the same indifferent industry it had maintained for five years, except that now it watched him differently. The eyes that had slid past him for five years caught and held—not withhostility, not with suspicion, but with a sharpened curiosity, as though her presence on the headland had made him visible in a way that five years of solitary duty had not.
He climbed the western path with his jaw set and the candles under his arm. The tower appeared over the rise, and she was at the door, shaking out the blanket in the wind. Her hair had come loose from its knot and hung about her shoulders, and the blanket snapped and billowed in her hands, and the sight of her—domestic, ordinary, entirely at ease in a place that had been his alone for five years—produced in him a reaction so tangled that he abandoned the path entirely and went to the knoll, where the timber at least had the decency to remain where he put it and not rearrange the interior of his chest every time he looked at it.
Chapter Fourteen
Shehadbegunwatchingthe sea.
Not the way he watched it—scanning for weather, for the set of the tide, for the angle at which the swell struck the reef. Her attention was different. It drifted southward along the coast, following the line of cliffs as they curved away from the headland toward the distant grey smudge where the shore flattened and the beaches opened to the wider water. She did it without thinking—or rather, she did it while thinking of something else, so that the watching became a habit of the body rather than a decision of the mind, and by the twelfth day she could not stand at the gallery window or the tower door without her gaze pulling south.
Jane had been twenty miles down that coast. Lynwood Park sat above the shore between Bamburgh and Holy Island, and the carriages that brought provisions to its kitchens would have passed through villages not so different from this one. Jane had written of the sea in her letters—how it changed colour with the sky, how the children from the estate played upon the sand, how she had walked the cliff path with her charges and pointed out the birds whose names she was still learning. Her last letter had mentioned a storm coming. She had said she hoped the roof would hold.
There had been no letter after that.
Elizabeth turned from the window and opened the journal.
Shefoundheropportunityon the thirteenth day, in the back room of the Anchor.
She had not intended to enter the tavern. She had come down the western path to collect provisions from Mrs Hargreaves and to post the letters she had writtenfour days ago and rewritten twice since. But the Anchor sat at the harbour’s edge, and its door stood open to the morning, and the man she needed to speak to was inside.
His name was Garrett Shaw, and he drove the supply cart between the coastal villages and the market towns inland. Mrs Hargreaves had mentioned him in passing—”Shaw knows every estate and every house between here and Alnwick, and half of them owe him money”—and Elizabeth had filed the name and waited for a morning when the cart stood at the harbour wall, and its driver could be found at breakfast.
He was a large man, soft-spoken, with the weathered patience of someone who spent his days on roads that did not improve. He sat at a table near the hearth with a plate of bread and dripping and a mug of something that steamed.
“Mr Shaw?”
He looked up. “Aye?”
“I am Elizabeth Bennet. The new steward at Blackscar.”
“I know who you are, miss. The whole coast knows.” He gestured to the bench opposite. “Sit, if you like.”
She sat. The tavern was nearly empty at this hour—only Shaw, the publican’s wife wiping down the bar, and an old man asleep in the corner with a dog at his feet.
“You drive supplies inland,” she said. “To the estates and the larger houses.”
“I do. Alnwick, Bamburgh, up to Berwick when the roads allow. Down as far as Warkworth if someone’s paying.”
“Do you know an estate called Lynwood Park? Between Bamburgh and Holy Island.”
Shaw chewed his bread. “I know of it. Don’t deliver there myself—they use Fenton’s cart out of Belford for the heavy goods. But I’ve passed the gate. Big house. Set back from the cliffs.” He studied her. “Why do you ask?”
She had prepared for this question, though the preparation had cost her more than she would admit. “My sister was employed there. As governess to the family’s children. She—” Elizabeth folded her hands upon the table. “She was lost in a storm, about a year and a half ago. The family wrote that she had gone walking along the cliff path and had not returned.”
Shaw set down his bread. His expression changed—not to pity, which she could not have borne, but to the sober attention of a man who lived upon a coast where the sea took people and did not always give them back.
“I’m sorry to hear it, miss.”
“Thank you. I wonder—in your travels along the coast, do you hear of… Do people sometimes wash ashore? After storms? Is there any system of record, any way of knowing if someone has been found?”
Shaw wiped his hands on his coat. “The harbourmasters keep records when a body comes in. Tull would have the local ones. Further south, it’d be the warden at Beadnell or the magistrate at Bamburgh. If your sister was lost near Lynwood, Bamburgh’s the authority.”
“And if she were not found? If no body was recovered?”
