Peter was at the verge with his goat. He did not greet her with his usual assessment of her climbing form. He stood with his cap in his hands and his face turned uphill, squinting at the tower as though confirming that what he had seen last night was still true in daylight.
“It’s lit, miss.”
“It is.”
“Did you fix it?”
“Not exactly.”
He considered this. The goat chewed. “Will it stay lit?”
“I intend to see that it does.”
He replaced his cap with the gravity of a man four times his age and returned to the goat, and Elizabeth continued down the path into a reception she had not anticipated.
Meg Robson intercepted her at the harbour wall. Joseph’s mother was a woman of considerable presence—broad-shouldered, grey-streaked, with hands that had gripped rope and iron since girlhood and a voice that carried the length of the quay without effort. She took Elizabeth’s arm without invitation and steered her toward her kitchen door as though collecting a parcel.
“Sit,” Meg said, depositing her at the table. “Tea’s on. Joseph’s seen the light from the water this morning—says the beam’s strong, good reach, channel’s marked clean for the first time in over a month.”
“It burned well last night.”
“It burned. That’s enough.” Meg set a cup before her. “The men were frettin’. Not that they’d say it—fishermen don’t say they fret, they sayconditionsandadvisementand then they don’t go out, which amounts to the same thing. Three boats stayed in harbour last week because the reef wasn’t marked. Three boats is three families without income. That’s done now.”
Elizabeth drank the tea. It was weaker than Mrs Hargreaves’ and kinder for it. “I am glad to hear they were able to go out again last night.”
“How did it come back?” Meg asked.
“I cannot explain it fully. The mechanism is functioning. The keeper has maintained it throughout—his work has been faultless. Whatever prevented ignition has resolved itself.”
Meg studied her with the frank appraisal of a woman who had spent forty years reading weather and considered people a simpler system. “Resolved itself.”
“Yes.”
“Like a stubborn flue that suddenly draws.”
“Something like that.”
Meg refilled her cup. The analogy had satisfied her, or she had chosen not to pursue what it left unexplained. Either way, Elizabeth was grateful. The truth—that the lantern had lit itself while she and the keeper were trapped in a rock cleft on the beach, having nearly drowned, having held each other for six hours, having kissed—was not a truth that could be offered to Meg Robson over tea, and the distance between what had happened and what could be said about it was a space Elizabeth would have to learn to inhabit.
Mrs Hargreaves arrived at the Robson kitchen within the quarter-hour, which meant her intelligence network was functioning at its usual efficiency. She entered without knocking, surveyed Elizabeth from boots to hairline, and sat down across the table with the expression of a woman who had questions she intended to ask regardless of the answers.
“You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“Your hem is salt-stained to the knee. Your left boot is scuffed through the leather. You have a bruise on your wrist the size of a shilling, and your voice sounds as though you have been gargling gravel.” Mrs Hargreaves folded her hands upon the table. “But the light is burning. Tell me everything, and do not omit.”
“I fell.”
“Youfell?”
“On the beach. The rocks were wet. I slipped and went into the water. The keeper pulled me out. I swallowed some seawater and coughed most of the night. But the lantern functioned last night.” Every word was true. The construction was a masterwork of omission, and Elizabeth delivered it with the same steady composure she had given to the chimney fiction and the collar fabrication, and she hated herself for it with a specificity that was becoming familiar.
Mrs Hargreaves held her gaze for a long time. “The keeper pulled you out?”
“He was on the beach gathering timber. Mercy he was, or I would have been washed out to sea.”
“And you were on the beach because?”
