No... not different hands. The same hands. That was the cruelty of it. The man was the same. The name was different. And the difference was a path she had not known existed, opening onto a very domesticated garden she had never been invited to see.
She stayed out there, walking the blustery headland until the sun began dropping. The afternoon light turned the sea to copper, and the tower’s shadow stretched across the headland toward the cliff edge where she stood. The evening was coming—the flame would need tending, the oil would need checking. The gallery that had enclosed them both every night for weeks would tonight enclose three, and the third would be a colonel who called the keeperDarcyand spoke of a sister named Georgiana and had ridden two days through January weather because the man she had been kissing was needed somewhere else.
She stayed at the cliff’s edge until the cold drove her back. Then she went to the cottage, lit her fire, and did not go to the tower or down to the village for supper. The flame in the gallery burned, but when she looked at it through her window that evening, the beam was weaker than it had been that morning.
The thinning had begun.
Shereturnedtothetower the following morning because the oil would not check itself, the wick would not trim itself, and the flame—diminished, thinner than it had been in weeks—would not strengthen on the moral high ground of her absence.
The colonel was at the table.
He had made himself at home with the utter competence of a man who had slept in barracks and billets and tents across three continents and who regarded any surface with a roof above it as luxury. He sat with a cup of tea—made badly, from the colour—and the logbook open before him, and he was reading it with the frank curiosity of a man who considered other people’s records fair game.
“Good morning, Miss Bennet.” He rose when she entered. The courtesy was automatic, embedded so deep in his bearing that it would have survived a decade of campaigning and probably had. “I hope you slept well.”
“I slept in my own cottage, Colonel. As I do every night.”
“Of course.” The smile carried no irony. No malice. Only the warmth of a man who understood that he had walked into a situation more complex than he had expected and was adjusting his approach with the efficiency of a field officer reassessing terrain. “The tea is poor. I apologise. Your keeper is in the gallery, and I am not competent with the stove.”
“He is notmykeeper.”
“Forgive me.Thekeeper.” He pulled a chair out for her.
She did not sit in it. She crossed to the shelf, took down her cup, poured her own tea from the kettle, and stood at the shelf to drink it. The positioning—upright, apart, the shelf at her back like a battlement—communicated what she intended it to communicate.
The colonel regarded her thoughtfully. “Miss Bennet, I owe you an explanation for yesterday. My arrival was... abrupt. I might have written ahead.”
“You might have. You chose not to, because writing ahead would have given him time to refuse you, and you did not wish to be refused.”
His expression flickered to something like acknowledgment. He looked at her over the rim of his cup with the first genuine attention he had given her—not the gentleman’s greetingof the day before, but something sharper, the recognition of an adversary where he had expected a bystander.
“That is accurate.”
“I am frequently accurate, Colonel. It is one of my less endearing qualities.”
He laughed. The sound was easy, unforced, the laugh of a man who enjoyed being surprised and did not encounter the experience often enough. It filled the small room with a warmth that the stove could not produce and the morning had not earned, and she disliked it—not the sound itself, which was pleasant, but the ease of it, the social fluency that produced laughter the way the mechanism produced light: reliably, attractively, without apparent effort.
She had never heard that kind of laughter from the man upstairs.
That was when William descended—Darcy, she must call him Darcy now, at least in her own mind, though the name sat like a stone on her tongue and would not smooth. His gaze went to the colonel and then to her, and then to the distance between them. The assessment was instantaneous, and the conclusion was visible in the thinning of his mouth.
“The oil is at three-quarters,” he said. To her. Not to the colonel. As though the colonel were furniture.
“Shall we lay out new wick lengths to be cut this afternoon?”
“The cant in the cradle should be corrected first. I will need your hands for the housing.”
“After midday, then.”
The exchange was professional, clipped, stripped of everything that had lived between their words for weeks. She heard the absence the way she heard silence in the gallery when the mechanism stopped—a wrongness, a gap where something should have been. The colonel heard it too. She could see him filing it alongside every other observation he was accumulating about the tower, the keeper, the steward, and the architecture of what he had interrupted.
Chapter Thirty
Thecolonelstayedthreedays, and each day was worse than the one before.
Richard had always been this way—the ease, the stories, the capacity to fill a room with himself without appearing to take up space. It was the Fitzwilliam gift, inherited from an uncle who could charm creditors into extending terms and from a mother who had held the attention of every drawing room she entered for thirty consecutive seasons. Richard wore it the way he wore his coat: comfortably, without thinking, as though warmth were something the body produced rather than something the world withheld.
Darcy had never possessed the gift. He had known this since boyhood—since the first assembly his father had taken him to, where George and Richard had danced with every girl in the room, and Darcy had stood beside the wall and spoken to no one. He had been taken home in the carriage with his father’s quiet observation that conversation was a skill, not an inheritance, and that some men must build what others are born with.
