“Someone I was... responsible for, whose safety I had guaranteed, and whom I did not protect when the protection was required.” The words came without the control he usually gave to speech—no precision, no modulation, no careful governance of what was revealed and what was withheld. The cold had got into him, too, and the cold did not permit artifice. “The details are not mine to share. They belong to the person I failed, and I will not compound the failure by using their suffering to explain my own.”
“And?”
“I left,” he said. “I left the life I had been living—the position, the obligations, the people who depended upon me. I came here because the tower was as far from that life as I could go without leaving the country. My failure was not here, but a different coast, a different reef... and a different tower with a keeper who did not wake himself during a storm. I came here to answer for it.”
Something eased between her brows. “Ah. S-so, th-that is it.”
He thinned his lips. “And because the work was solitary, and because I believed that solitude was what I owed.”
“Owed t-to whom?”
“To the person I failed. And to myself. For being the kind of man who could fail in that way.”
The water lapped at the base of the rocks. The tide was still rising, but slower now—the first urgency of the flood had passed, and the sea had settled into the patient, incremental work of filling every space the cliff permitted. The sky had clouded over. The light inside the cleft was grey and even and without shadow, and it fell across both of them without preference. He had nothing left to compose. The cold had taken whatever he usually held between himself and the world, and what she was looking at now was whatever remained beneath it.
“Solitude is not a debt,” she said. “It is a hiding place.”
He looked at her then. Her hair snarled in blackened shreds against her neck. The coat swallowed her frame, the colour had not returned to her face, and her lips were still tinged with the cold that had nearly killed her. And she looked at him with the directness she brought to everything—lantern rooms and collapsed chimneys and harbour wardens and the sea itself—the same unflinching attention she had aimed at him from the first night,when she had climbed a stair he had forbidden and stood in his gallery and told him the lantern was her charge as much as his.
Chapter Nineteen
“Howmanygullsdoyou suppose are on the water?”
He looked down at the top of her head. Her hair was plastered against her skull, dark with salt water, and the smell of it was brine and sand and nothing else.
“What?”
“The gulls. On the water. Out there.” She did not lift her head from his chest. “I am trying to make conversation, and I find myself at a disadvantage, as I cannot see anything from this position except your shirt, which is not a rich subject.”
He stared at the rock wall opposite. “You nearly drowned.”
“Yes. And now I am cold and frightened, and if I do not speak, I will think about it, and I would rather not think about it. So.” A breath. A smaller shiver. “The gulls.”
“I cannot see the gulls from here.”
“Then the clouds. What shape are the clouds? You can see them from your side.”
He looked through the opening of the cleft. The sky had thickened since they had climbed up—a low, grey blanket that sat upon the water without distinction. “There are no shapes. The cloud is uniform.”
“That is a very dull answer.”
“It is an accurate answer.”
“Accuracy and dullness are not mutually exclusive. You might say the cloud resembles a vast grey counterpane drawn over the sea by someone who wished the sea to sleep. That would be accurate and interesting.”
“I would not say that.”
“No. You would not.” Her teeth still chattered, but her voice had levelled out somewhat. The shivering still ran through them both, but she spoke around it with a determination that he was beginning to recognise as her primary mode of survival—if her body failed, her tongue would carry on.
“Do you know,” she said, “I believe this is the longest we have been in each other’s company without arguing about the lantern.”
“We have been in each other’s company for just over three weeks.”
“Yes, and every conversation has eventually returned to brass and oil and the tolerances of the wick mechanism. This is refreshing. We should nearly drown more often.”
“That is not amusing.”
“It isslightlyamusing.” She shifted against him, and the movement brought her closer, the shape of her more snugly inside the sensitive parts of his arms, and the fists against his chest uncurled by a degree. “You are very bad at this.”
