Chapter Fifteen
Theletterscameupwith Robson's youngest on a Tuesday, tucked inside the canvas sack that held the week’s provisions and a tin of the tea she preferred.
He heard the boy’s whistle on the path before he saw him—James the younger, fifteen, cheerful to the point of affliction, who made the climb three times a week and always announced himself as though the headland were a stage and he its most devoted audience. The keeper met him at the tower door and took the sack, and the boy lingered the way he always lingered, craning his neck for a glimpse of the gallery above or the steward within.
“Letters in the bottom,” young James said. “Two for you, one for Miss Bennet, and one from Newcastle that’s marked for the pair of you.”
“Thank you.”
“Is Miss Bennet about? Ma sent up a jar of—”
“She is in the village. You may leave the jar.”
The boy set the jar on the step—gooseberry preserve, from the look of it—and descended with a backward glance that suggested he would have preferred to deliver it in person. The keeper watched him go, then carried the sack inside and emptied it upon the table.
Four letters. He sorted them in his hand.
The first bore the seal of Hathaway & Crane, Lincoln’s Inn. The trustees. He set it aside for Miss Bennet; it was addressed to her, and he did not open what was not his. The second was from the Heaton foundry in Newcastle and was addressed toThe Keeper, Blackscar Light, per the Steward, Blackscar Trust—a formulation that would have been addressed to him alone a month ago, and that now bore Miss Bennet’s title like a second lock upon the door. He set this beside the first.
The third and fourth he held.
His sister’s hand was unmistakable. She wrote in the sloping, generous script her governess had drilled into her from the age of six—a hand that belonged to drawing rooms and morning correspondence and the kind of life that produced letters on cream paper sealed with wax the colour of claret. The letter was thick. She had written at length, which meant she was either very well or very worried, and neither possibility could be examined in a moment.
The fourth bore no seal. It was written in the same hand that had addressed him every quarter for five years—even, methodical, the penmanship of someone trained to correspondence long before he was born.
He stood at the table with both letters in his hands and did not open either. Both would require reading in solitude, at length, and the answers they demanded—if he permitted himself to give answer—would require more than the minute or two before Miss Bennet returned from the village.
He was still holding them when the door opened behind him.
He turned. She stood in the doorway with the wind at her back and the empty basket swinging at her side, and her gaze went to the table—to the sorted letters, to the Lincoln’s Inn seal, to the foundry correspondence—and then to his hands, where his sister’s letter lay uppermost, its cream paper and claret wax and unmistakably feminine script displayed as plainly as if he had set it on a shelf for her inspection.
Her eyes moved across the handwriting. He saw it register—not comprehension, but interest. A woman’s hand, elegant, intimate, on correspondence addressed to a man who claimed no attachments and kept no company and had given her a false name rather than surrender a single fact about himself.
The corner of her mouth moved. A small, private alteration—not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the kind of expression a woman produces when she has noticed something interesting and has chosen, for now, to say nothing about it.
He put both letters inside his coat.
The motion was too swift. He knew it as he made it—the haste betraying what composure would have concealed. A man with nothing to hide does not pocket his correspondence like a boy caught with a stolen apple. But the letters were inside his coat now, and his hand was at his side, and too much had been seen and too little said, as was always the way between them.
“Letters?” she asked, as though she had noticed nothing at all.
“Yours is there. The one with the Lincoln’s Innseal.”
She crossed to the table and picked it up, turning it in her hands. “And have we heard from the foundry?”
“Beside it.”
She took the foundry letter and held it without opening it. “This is addressed to both of us.”
“I am aware.”
“Then we shall open it together.”
She broke the seal and unfolded the page, and he moved to stand beside her because the alternative—standing across the room while she read aloud—would have ceded a degree of authority he was not prepared to yield. They read in silence. The letter was brief, businesslike, and unwelcome.
Dear Madam and Sir,
We acknowledge receipt of your order for one (1) replacement collar, Heaton design, to the specifications of the most recent Blackscar commission (1753). We regret to advise that the casting has been delayed owing to a fault in the mould, which must be recut before production may proceed. We anticipate dispatch within six to eight weeks from the date of this letter.
