NellCaldernowtooktea with Elizabeth every Wednesday.
The arrangement had begun without formal invitation—Nell had appeared at the cottage door one afternoon with a pot and two cups and the declaration that she had been sent by no one and was visiting of her own will, which Elizabeth interpreted correctly as meaning Mrs Hargreaves had sent her. And Nell had agreed because Nell liked her and preferred honesty about the mechanism of arrival if not about its origin.
Elizabeth was still in awe that Nell could make that two-mile walk up the hill every week. She had lived in the village since birth, had married a fisherman at nineteen, buried him at forty-one, and spent the intervening forty-two years in a cottage overlooking the harbour with a cat named Captain and a memory that retained every storm, every wreck, every birth and death and marriage the village had witnessed since the reign of George the Second.
“Marian Hale did not take tea,” Nell said, on the third Wednesday. “Marian drank ale, when she drank at all, and she did not invite company. I respected her for it. I did not like her, but she did not need to be liked.”
“I am trying to be more approachable than Marian.”
“You are succeeding. Whether that is advisable remains to be seen.” Nell held her cup in both hands—the joints swollen, the fingers curved with the set of decades hauling rope and gutting fish and wringing linen. “The light is burning better than it has in years.”
“It does look well.”
“The village is glad. Not grateful—gratitude implies a debt, and the village does not consider the light a gift. The light is a right. The steward keeps it. The keeper tends it. The village lives by it. That is the arrangement, and it has been the arrangement since before anyone living can remember, and if it continues, they will accept it without comment. But if it fails, they will never forgive you.”
“That is remarkably clear.”
“I am eighty-three. I no longer have use for ambiguity.” Nell drank her tea. “Your keeper is a strange man.”
Elizabeth swallowed hard. “He is notmykeeper.”
“He isthekeeper, and you are the steward, and the arrangement binds you whether the possessive suits you or not. He is strange. Not unpleasant, but very strange. He speaks like a man who was educated beyond his station, which means either he has risen or he has fallen, and the coast collects more of the latter than the former.”
Theobservation landed where Nell intended it to land.
“He tends well,” was all Elizabeth said.
“Tom says the mechanism has never been in better order. That is not nothing.”
Elizabeth nodded. “No. It is not.”
“And he looks at you when you are not looking at him, which is also not nothing, though it is considerably more complicated.”
Elizabeth drank her tea. Nell watched her drink it. The conversation moved on to the price of fish and the state of Nell’s chimney, and neither of them returned to the subject of the keeper or his gaze, and neither of them needed to.
AparcelfromGracechurchStreetarrived in the first week of December, wrapped in blue paper with her uncle’s handwriting on the address—neat, practical, the hand of a man who conducted business efficiently and affection in the same manner.
Inside were a new pair of gloves. Kid leather, lined with wool, the colour of chestnuts. A bonnet—dark green, trimmed with ribbon, more fashionable than anything the coast required but chosen with the particular care her aunt gave to every gift, as though beauty were a form of sustenance and ought to be provided regardless of circumstances.
There was also a letter from her uncle in which he asked after the light and the accounts and mentioned, in passing, that Kitty had taken up watercolours, Mary was thriving under the tutelage of her new piano master, and that the house was quieter without her.
There was a letter from her aunt in which she asked after Elizabeth’s health and her spirits, and enclosed a cutting from a London paper about the Northumberland coast that she had thought Elizabeth might find interesting.
No letter from her mother. No letter from Lydia. The absence sat inside the parcel like an object she had chosen not to unwrap.
She wore the gloves to the tower that afternoon. He saw them—she was certain he saw them, because his gaze dropped to her hands when she set the basket on the table and the leather caught the firelight—but he said nothing about them, the way he said nothing about the hair, the way he said nothing about anything that acknowledged she was a woman and not merely a steward who checked oil levels and tended wicks and argued with trustees on his behalf.
She wondered, as she climbed the stair to the gallery that evening, whether anyone would send him anything for Christmas. The cream paper had not appeared on the table for a fortnight. The quarterly letter—the one in the even, business-like hand—would be due soon. If his sister had replied again, the letter had not come, or it had come, and he had concealed it more successfully than the first pair.
She could not ask. She could not ask because asking would mean acknowledging that she had catalogued the frequency of his correspondence, which would mean acknowledging that she paid attention to his private life with an attentiveness she could not justify, which would mean acknowledging something she had acknowledged in the gallery three weeks ago with her hand on his neck and her mouth on his, and which she had been systematically refusing to acknowledge since.
The wick needed trimming. She knelt at the housing and trimmed it, and the flame steadied, and the beam turned, and below her the headland lay in darkness and above her the glass carried its light, and she was the steward of both.
Hewentdowntothe village on a Thursday for oil.
The harbour was busy in the way harbours are busy in mid winter—the boats coming in earlier, the catches smaller, the men working faster against the shortened light. He collected the oil from Hurst and loaded the tins onto the handcart he had borrowed, and he was at the harbour wall adjusting the rope when Tom Calder and Jem Docket found him.
“Wickie.” Tom leaned against the wall with the ease of a man whose chief occupation was finding surfaces to lean against. “Haven’t seen you in a fortnight. Been busy up there?”
