Your obedient servants, &c.
“Six to eight weeks,” she breathed.
“I can read.”
“We only have a fortnight left. This collar will not arrive within a fortnight.”
“We knew it would not.”
She set the letter upon the table and pressed both hands flat upon its surface, and he watched what it cost her to master the composure.Six to eight weeks.The collar that did not need replacing would not arrive in time to sustain the fiction that it did, and Tull’s deadline would pass with the mechanism still dark and the report still open and Trinity House still waiting for a resolution that a brass collar had never been able to provide.
“I will write to the foundry again,” she said. “I will explain the urgency. I will offer to pay for expedited work.”
“With what funds? The trustees have not released the endowment.”
“You do not know that.” She looked at the Lincoln’s Inn letter still unopened in her other hand. She broke the seal and read it standing, her lips moving faintly, and he saw the contents unfold in her face—a thinning of her mouth, a stillness in her hands that spoke louder than anything she might have said.
“They have declined,” she said. “The trustees have declined to release repair funds until they have received a surveyor’s report on the condition of the property. They are sending an assessor.”
“When?”
“They do not say. They say, ‘at the earliest convenience,’ which in the language of trustees means whenever it suits their purpose and not a day before. How do they have the authority to delay when I am the one with the authority to command the funds?”
He shook his head. “You have known them less than a month. I assure you, Miss Bennet, this is, indeed, their way.”
She folded the letter and placed it beside the foundry correspondence, and the two documents sat upon the table like a pair of doors closing simultaneously—the mechanical solution delayed, the financial solution denied, and the month blowing away in the wind between them.
“We will manage Tull,” she said. “I will explain the foundry delay, and I will request an extension.”
“Tull does not grant extensions. He files reports.”
“Then I will give him a report worth filing. The collar is ordered. The pyre is maintained. The steward is in residence, and the keeper is at his post. Tull is a reasonable man.”
“Tull is a man with a duty to the coast, and his duty does not include patience.”
She looked at him, and something in her expression shifted—not softening, not warmth, but the grim recognition of two people standing on the same side of a problem neither of them had chosen. “Then we had better give him something other than patience to work with.”
She took up the pen—hispen—and began to write.
Hereadhissister’sletter on the gallery floor at midnight, with the hand-lantern beside his knee and the mechanism ticking its useless rotationabove him.
Dearest Brother,
I write without any assurance that this letter will find you, as the last three have not been returned, but neither have they been answered. I choose to believe that you received them and that your silence is the silence of a man occupied with important work rather than a man who has forgot he has a sister.
He closed his eyes briefly, then read on.
My aunt has authorised a visit to Bath for the autumn, and we have taken a house in the Crescent that suits us very well. Uncle says the waters will improve my constitution, though my constitution is perfectly sound, and I suspect the true purpose is to improve my spirits, which are less so.
Bath is diverting enough. I practise. I walk. I attend the assemblies when my aunt insists, which is more often than I should like. I am told I play well and that I ought to smile more, which is advice I receive with the same regularity and the same indifference.
We return to London for Christmastide. My aunt is determined upon it, and I confess I am glad, for the house feels more like home than anywhere else has these past two years. I will not ask you to join us. You have made your position clear, and I respect it, though I do not understand it and cannot pretend to. But if you were to come—if you found that the season permitted it—I should like it very much. I should like it more than I can say in a letter you may not read.
He turned the page. Her handwriting loosened as the letter continued—the careful slopes giving way to a freer hand, as though the act of writing to him had gradually released something she kept governed in company.
I do not ask you to come home. I know better than to ask what has been refused. But I ask you to write. One page. One line. Anything that tells me you are alive and that the sea has not taken you as it takes everything else upon that coast.
Your sister,G.
