“At what?”
“At conversation. At the kind of silly diversion that fills time and passes pleasantly without arriving anywhere in particular. Drawing-room conversation.”
“I have not spent a great deal of time in drawing rooms.”
“No? I would have guessed otherwise, from the accent. You do a creditable job of convincing yourself you sound like a local, but you cannot quite conceal the posh beneath it.”
He said nothing. The wind found the opening of the cleft and sent a thin blade of cold across his exposed side—the side she did not occupy—and he turned his shoulder to block it.
“I went to sea at eighteen,” he said. “Before that, I was at school, where the conversation was conducted largely through insult and competition. I have never acquired the habit of speaking for the sake of speaking. I say what is necessary and am silent when it is not.”
“That must make you very popular at suppers.”
“I do not attend suppers.”
“No. You attend a lighthouse. Where the only conversation is with a mechanism that will not answer and a steward who will not stop asking questions.”
He looked down at her again. Her face was still turned against his chest, but the corner of her mouth was visible, and it held the ghost of something—not quite the smile she had produced at the sight of his sister’s handwriting, but something adjacent. A warmth she was permitting herself because the alternative was the cold and the dark and the memory of the water closing over her head.
“You are… your constant questions are not entirely odious,” he allowed.
He could not mistake it this time. Her mouth tugged into a decided smirk. “Well spoken—the words of a true gentleman, I daresay. Now, it is your turn.”
“My turn?”
“To fill the silence. I have offered you gulls and clouds and an observation about your conversational deficiencies. You must contribute something, or the exchange becomes a monologue. I have four sisters, and I can tell you from long experience that no one enjoys a monologue except the person delivering it.”
“Four sisters?”
She winced. “Three now. Jane was the eldest. Then me. Then Mary, who reads sermons for pleasure. Then Kitty, who reads novels for pleasure. Then Lydia, who reads nothing for pleasure but is the loudest person in any room she enters, and I love her dearly and would cheerfully lock her in a cupboard.”
He came perilously close to a grunt of… not amusement. The family assembled itself in his mind—not as names but as an architecture of relationships, a household of women governed by the second eldest, who just now sat in a cleft in a rock on a Northumberland coast with her lungs still clearing seawater and made jokes about cupboards, because if she stopped joking she would have to feel what had happened, and she was not ready to feel it.
“You are the one who manages them all,” he said.
She stiffened only slightly, and her brow creased. “I was... before I came to Northumberland.” The confirmation carried no pride. “Papa managed before me. But Papa—Papa had a way of managing that involved sitting in his library and trusting the world to conduct itself without his intervention, and the world obliged him right up until the point where it did not.” Her jaw tightened. “He died two years ago. His heart.”
His arms tightened. It was an accident. “I am sorry.”
“He would have liked you, I think. He admired people who were difficult to talk to. He said the easy ones were never worth the effort.”
“I am trying to decide whether you meant to frame that as a compliment.”
The water lapped below. A gull called from somewhere beyond the opening of the cleft—sharp, plaintive, unanswered.
“One,” she said.
“What?”
“One gull. I heard one. You may begin your count.”
He let out a breath that was not a laugh. It was the nearest thing to one he had produced in five years, and it surprised him so thoroughly that for an instant, the cold and the rockand the sea fell away and there was only the absurdity of a woman counting gulls against his chest while the tide decided whether to kill them.
“Tell me about your sisters.”
The question surprised her. Her body stilled its shivers against him—a half-second of suspended breath, as though she had expected him to retreat into silence and was adjusting to the fact that he had not.
“What would you like to know?”
