Chapter 6
Chapter Six
He had taken the longer way up, a length of pale timber balanced against his shoulder, another rope-bound bundle dragging behind him over the grass. The tide had been generous that afternoon. Enough to make a decent fire if the wind would permit it.
He paused only to shift his grip and saw the carriage.
It was already turning south, wheels grinding over the broader track. A gentleman sat inside, hat raised briefly toward the cottage before the carriage faded from view.
He did not alter his pace. Visitors came rarely. When they did, they seldom lingered. They came for the view, not for him.
But there was someone left behind.
A woman stood before the cottage door, her cloak drawn close against the wind. He had never seen her, but the white-haired figure beside her he knew at once. He adjusted the timber upon his shoulder and continued upward.
Mrs Hargreaves saw him first. “There now,” she called above the wind. “Here he is.”
He laid the driftwood down with care before approaching, wiping his hands against his coat. The woman turned toward him.
She was younger than he would have guessed from that first glimpse of her profile. Her gloves were city-made; her posture unbent by wind. Yet she did not shrink from the air. It took her breath, perhaps, but not her footing.
“Wickie,” Mrs Hargreaves said briskly, as though presenting a tool rather than a man. “You’ve company.”
He inclined his head slightly. “Ma’am.”
The young woman regarded him with a directness that did not waver. “You are the keeper?”
“I am.” He looked to Mrs Hargreaves.
“She’s Miss Bennet,” Mrs Hargreaves supplied. “Come to take up the stewardship.”
His hand closed at his side. The word entered him the way cold water enters a boot—with the certainty that nothing below would remain dry.
The stewardship?
He had been told the line was finished. The trustees had written it plainly when he took up the post: the female succession had lapsed, the last known heir had failed to present herself a generation ago, and no further claim was anticipated.
He had filed the letter with the rest of the administrative correspondence and thought no more of it.
His post was the lantern. The stewardship was a legal matter, belonging to solicitors and drawing rooms, and it was, he thought, extinct.
Except that the woman standing before him was not extinct.
He returned his gaze to her. She had not moved. Her chin was level, her weight settled, her hands still at her sides. She was ready to be challenged.
“You intend to reside at Blackscar,” he said. It was not a question.
“That is my purpose.”
He glanced back down the slope; in the direction the carriage had taken. “And you’ve no companion, no family to stay with you?”
Miss Bennet’s chin rose by the smallest increment. “My uncle has seen me settled.”
“Your uncle,” he said, “has left.”
Mrs Hargreaves stepped between them with the efficiency of a woman accustomed to heading off quarrels before they had properly begun.
“Here, now, Wickie, Mr Gardiner did his duty by the lass. ‘Twere a matter of prudence what made him leave now. And I was just about to tell Miss Bennet we’d best make our way down to the village before the rain sets in. My son’s house is dry and warm, and there’s a bed aired and ready. ”
Miss Bennet’s brows drew together. “Down to the village? But I am to stay here. The cottage is my residence.”
“In summer, perhaps,” Mrs Hargreaves replied. “The roof leaks along the south seam. The chimney smokes when the wind sits wrong. There are no stores laid in and no stove fit to cook upon. I’ve said as much already, Miss.”
She blinked, and her chest rose in a shocked breath. “You said the stove was being mended. You said so before my uncle.”
“I said Robson took the scrap down and would fashion something better. I did not say when, and I did not say the cottage was fit for a night like this one coming.” Mrs Hargreaves folded her arms. “Your uncle did not mean for you to stay here.”
“I assure you, he did, and so did I! We trusted your assurances that all was in hand.”
“And so, it is. In hand, down at the village, where there’s a fire and a proper roof and folk about.”
Miss Bennet turned from Mrs Hargreaves and took three steps toward the cottage. She pushed the door wider. He could see from where he stood what she saw: the narrow room, the cold grate, the damp stone, the lack of furniture. She stood in the doorway and did not flinch from it.
“The walls are sound,” she said. “The door fastens.”
“The walls won’t keep you warm when the chimney fills the room with smoke,” Mrs Hargreaves answered. “And the door won’t matter if the ceiling drips upon your bed.”
“Miss Bennet,” he said at last.
She turned to him.
He frowned. Outrageous that he should have to state the obvious, but there it was.
“You are an unmarried woman. There is no household here. Mrs Hargreaves resides in the village. The nearest dwelling beyond this cottage is the tower, which is my quarters.” He held her gaze and saw the comprehension arrive before he finished.
“If you remain upon this headland tonight, you do so alone, without a chaperone, and within two hundred yards of an unmarried man. There is no construction of that arrangement which would satisfy propriety. None.”
The colour came into her face. Her shoulders drew back—a small, precise correction, as though someone had pulled a thread at the base of her spine. She did not look away.
“I am aware of the geography.”
“Then you are aware of what will be said.”
“What will be said is not my concern tonight. What concerns me is the stewardship, which requires that I reside upon this property. If I leave for the village on my first evening and do not return until the weather clears and the cottage has been made comfortable, I have established that the terms of residence cannot be met. The trustees will hear of it. I assure you, they will hear of it before the week is out.”
Mrs Hargreaves made a sharp sound. “No one’s writing to any trustees, Miss.”
“Someone always writes, Mrs Hargreaves. That is how I came to be standing here at all.”
That was one thing she was correct about.
He could feel the truth of it settle against his ribs like a stone dropped into still water.
She had not come by accident. She had been sent—by the same mechanism of letters and authority that he had filed away and forgot.
And now she stood on his headland quoting the terms of her own appointment with the fluency of a woman who had read them more than once.
The wind blustered harder against the cottage wall. Somewhere below, the sea struck the rocks with a sound like a door slamming. He looked at the sky. The clouds that had been merely grey were thickening toward slate.
“Mrs Hargreaves is right about the cottage,” he said.
He was not retreating from the question of propriety.
He was giving her a different set of facts to refuse.
“The chimney is unsound. I have seen it smoke badly enough in a westerly to drive a man out. Tonight’s wind will sit precisely wrong for it. ”
“Then I shall open a window.”
“You will open a window in an October gale on an exposed headland?”
“If I must.”
Mrs Hargreaves threw both hands outward. “Lord save us from London girls. Miss Bennet, your uncle put you in my charge—”
“My uncle put me in no one’s charge. I am one and twenty, and I hold this stewardship by legal right.
I will not abandon the property to prove that I cannot endure it.
” She turned to Mrs Hargreaves fully now, and her voice, though it did not rise, grew very crisp.
“You may stay with me, in which case propriety is satisfied, and we shall manage the chimney between us. Or you may return to the village, in which case I shall manage alone. But I am not walking down that hill.”
Mrs Hargreaves stared at her. The older woman’s mouth worked once, twice, and then set itself into a line that he recognised. He had seen it before—on mornings when the weather was already decided, and argument would only waste the breath.
“I’ll not stay in a house with a bad chimney and no supper and call it sense,” Mrs Hargreaves said. “And I’ll not answer to your uncle for what comes of it.”
Miss Bennet arched a pair of fine brows. “You need not answer to anyone. The decision is mine.”
Mrs Hargreaves looked at him, as though expecting him to supply some final objection that would end the matter.
He had several. None that would move this woman. He was beginning to understand that. But the matter of her reputation would not improve by going unspoken, and he would not be the man who failed to speak it.
“Miss Bennet.” He kept his voice level, though his hands had found the seam of his coat and were holding it the way they held rope in weather—something to grip when the footing went uncertain.
“If you remain here, the cottage is not provisioned. The chimney is uncertain. The storm will not care that you have a legal right to endure it.” He met her gaze.
“And I will be two hundred yards from your door. By morning, the village will know it. That is not a warning I offer for my benefit.”
She regarded him for a long count. When she spoke, her voice carried no heat. It carried something worse: the composed, unhurried clarity of a woman stating what ought to have been obvious from the start.
“The stewardship is mine by legal succession. The keeper of this lantern serves at the steward’s appointment.
That is the settlement. That is the law.
” She did not look away. “A lady residing upon her own property, with a man in her employ who sleeps in a detached building adjoined to his work, is not a scandal, sir. It is an establishment. If the village cannot distinguish between the two, the deficiency is not mine.”