“Whatever you would like to tell me. Talking keeps you from shaking so hard and only requires me to listen.”
“Jane sings. She does not think she sings well, but she does. Mary plays better, technically, but Jane’s voice—”
She stopped.The present tense. She had used it, and the word hung in the air of the cleft, and she did not correct it. She glanced up at him—just the ridge of her lashes appearing from under her brows as she peeked. Her ribs expanded in a slightly deeper breath, and she forged on.
“Well, Jane’s voice does what Mary’s fingers cannot. It makes you listen without knowing you are listening.”
“And Kitty?”
“Kitty draws. She will not show anyone. She keeps a book beneath her mattress, and I found it once—not snooping, I was changing the linens, which is not the same thing—and the drawings were extraordinary. Faces, mostly. People in the village. She sees people the way—”
She stopped again. He waited.
“The way I read them. From the outside. But she puts it on paper, and I only put it in my head, and the difference is that hers can be shared and mine cannot, and I have always envied her that.”
“And what of Lydia?”
“Lydia is fifteen and believes herself immortal and finds the entire world insufficiently entertaining and is so thoroughly, exasperatingly alive that being in a room with her is like standing beside a bonfire. You cannot look away and you cannot get close without being singed.” The affection in her voice was fierce and unguarded, and he heard it the way he heard the change in the wind—a shift in register that told him something fundamental about the weather. “I worry about Lydia most.”
“Because she is the youngest?”
“Becauseshe does not understand that the world does not forgive young women for being exasperating. She stayed in Hertfordshire with Mama after... Well, when the rest of us went to London. Fewer people looking over her shoulder there, you see. Young men are permitted to be wild. Young ladies are permitted to be nothing.”
The observation echoed in the cleft, and he did not argue with it because he could not. He had seen enough of the world to know she was right, and the knowledge sat beside his own failures with a weight he could not pretend did not belong to him.
Time passed. He could mark it by the water—the tide reaching its highest point against the rocks below, holding, trembling at the edge of its ambition before beginning the long, slow retreat. Her shivering had eased to an occasional tremor. His had not—the side of him exposed to the air had gone numb from shoulder to hip, and the cold had settled into his hands with a permanence that would take hours beside a fire to reverse.
She was warmer than she had been. He was colder. The exchange was working as intended, even if the benefit had been hers and the cost was his.
“Your turn,” she said. “Tell me something. Not the… nothing serious. Something small. Something ordinary.”
He thought about this. The request was simple, and the simplicity was the difficulty—he had spent five years reducing himself to the work, stripping away everything that was not the tower and the flame, until the ordinary had become foreign and the personal had become dangerous.
“I like dogs.”
She made a sound against his chest. It might have been a laugh. It was too small and too broken to be certain, but the shape of it was right.
“I had one,” he went on. “Before. A spaniel. She was old and deaf and had a habit of sleeping in doorways so that no one could enter or leave without disturbing her, and she was the best judge of character I have ever known.”
“What was her name?”
“Bella.”
“What happened to her?”
“She is with—” He stopped. Reassembled. “She is even older now, just as deaf, and is with someone who takes care of her. She is well.”
“You miss her.”
His lungs filled. “I miss her.”
The water had dropped two feet from its highest mark. The sand was beginning to show at the base of the cliff—dark, wet, littered with fresh kelp. Perhaps an hour more. Perhaps less. The light through the opening had changed—the flat grey of the overcast morning giving way to something thinner, more angular, the light of an afternoon already beginning to fail.
“Tell me something else,” she said.
“I do not have an inexhaustible supply of harmless facts.”
“Then tell me a harmful one. Something you would not say if you were not cold and trapped and holding a half-drowned woman in a very small hole in the side of a cliff.”
