Elizabeth frowned and thumbed the edge of the letter; folding a tiny corner, then flattening it... folding it again.
“She would have come of age a year ago last April,” Kitty said faintly.
“She would,” Mr Gardiner replied.
Elizabeth looked again at the neat, impersonal script of the Trustees’ notice.In the absence of formal acknowledgment... alternate measures...
“And because she did not answer,” she said quietly, “it passes now to me.”
“Yes.”
She did not immediately respond. The fire shifted; a small cinder fell inward upon itself.
“Is there penalty if it is refused?”
“Not to you,” Mr Gardiner said. “The settlement provides for succession. If you decline, the right passes in turn to Mary, then to Kitty, then to Lydia. Should none of you accept, the Trustees maintain temporary authority until one of the line produces a daughter of age to receive it.”
Kitty glanced at Elizabeth. “Lydia would refuse it before the letter was fully read.”
“Lydia is Lydia,” Elizabeth said.
“And Mama cannot be applied to.” Kitty’s voice dropped. “Do not even ask her, Lizzy. Not about this. Not about anything that touches the coast.”
Mr Gardiner turned his spectacles in his hands. He did not contradict her.
Elizabeth huffed. “Why, we could leave it indefinitely, could we not? If there are trustees who manage the property currently, and must have done since... how long,Uncle?”
“My mother was the last to accept the charge. Well! She had a strange word for it—insisted upon calling it a 'covenant,' though the word seems somewhat misplaced. She married your grandfather the following year, but because she was unmarried when it devolved upon her, it remained with her until her death. I believe you were still a babe at that time.”
“A full generation,” Elizabeth mused.
“The Trustees’ authority is limited. Their office preserves the property; it does not guide it. And I am told the structure is... in need of modernization.”
Elizabeth’s eyes lifted at that word.
“It is, as I recall, a very old tower,” he added.
The letter lay cool against her palm. A lighthouse on the Northumberland coast, attached to a name she had not known her family carried, preserved by an instrument older than anyone in this room. A charge without income, without comfort, without any of the inducements that might have recommended it to a woman whose circumstances were easier than hers had become.
Charlotte had written last week from Longbourn — from the house that was now hers and Mr Collins’s in all but memory. The letter had been kind, as Charlotte’s letters always were, and careful not to assume a familiarity that the alteration in their situations might have strained. She had asked after the family. She had not asked whether there was news of Jane, because Charlotte understood that if there were news, she would not need to ask.
Elizabeth had written back the same afternoon. There was no bitterness in the correspondence — there never had been. Charlotte had married where circumstance required and managed what she was given with her practical sort of competence. That Longbourn had passed to Mr Collins upon Papa’s death was the law’s doing, not Charlotte’s, and Elizabeth had spent what anger she possessed on the law itself and found none remaining for the woman who had simply walked through the door it opened.
But the loss sat beneath every decision she made in this house that was not hers, at this table that was not hers, in a city that had taken her in because the country had put her out. Three sisters in their uncle’s drawing room, maintained by his generosity and their aunt’s grace, with nothing between them and dependence but the fraying thread of their own usefulness.
That was why Jane had gone to Lynwood. And why Elizabeth had meant to go somewhere, as well. Indeed, she had a position in Dover ready to accept her, and had been set to depart only the week before… She shook her head and returned her gaze to the page.
A lighthouse. Without income. On a coast she had never seen.
“Blackscar Lantern,” she repeated, as though testing the sound.
Kitty drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders. “Northumberland is very far.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said.
But she did not fold the letter.
Hehadmendedthelength of rope retrieved that morning from the beach, cut away what could not be saved, and set the rest to coil upon its peg. The oil had been measured and recorded. The wind had shifted northward, but not with force enough to trouble the glass. There was nothing to anticipate beyond the ordinary rotation of watches.
