Chapter 6 #2
Something locked behind his teeth. He could feel it—the shape of the objection, pressing forward, and the discipline that held it back.
She had not called him a servant. She had not needed to.
She had simply described the architecture of the arrangement, and the architecture placed him beneath her roof, beneath her authority, and beneath her notice as a man.
It was, in every legal particular, correct.
Mrs Hargreaves pulled her shawl tighter and looked between them once more.
Whatever she had expected him to supply, it was not silence.
“Well! She has the right of it, Wickie. On your head, then, Miss.” She turned to him.
“If she takes ill in the night, I’ll hold you accountable for not carrying her down the hill by force. ”
“I do not carry women by force, Mrs Hargreaves.”
“More’s the pity.”
She began the descent without looking back, her boots finding the track with the sureness of long habit. She cast one hand into the air behind her—an open palm, flung upward as though releasing the entire matter into the keeping of God and weather.
He turned to Miss Bennet. She stood in the doorway of the cottage, one hand upon the frame. The set of her shoulders carried the faintest tremor. Her jaw was tight. She held the posture the way a person holds a door against a wind that has not yet peaked.
“There is food at the tower,” he said. “And coal. If the chimney fails, you will need both.”
She did not thank him. She inclined her head—a motion so slight it might have been the wind—and stepped inside.
The door closed. The bolt drew.
He stood where he was, the timber still lying where he had set it down.
The cottage chimney was cold. No smoke, no light behind the glass. She was in there with damp blankets and a grate and nothing to put in it.
He gathered the driftwood and began the ascent toward the tower. Halfway up, he stopped and looked back. The cottage sat low against the darkening hill, its windows black, its door shut fast against a wind that was only beginning.
Two things on this headland that should have been lit, and neither was.
He turned and climbed.
The bolt slid home with a firm, final sound.
Elizabeth stood with her hand still upon it, listening. Her fingers had not quite steadied. She pressed them flat against the wood and held them there until they did.
The rain had not yet committed itself; it moved lightly against the stones, as though testing them. Through the small window facing the slope she could see Mrs Hargreaves descending with surprising speed for one of her years, her figure diminishing until the rise swallowed her altogether.
The cottage was very quiet. The wind found its edges—sill, shutter, the gap beneath the door—but inside, the silence was the kind that waits to be filled and does not care if it is not.
She turned to the other window.
The tower stood against the dull sky, its stone darkened where earlier weather had passed over it.
A little below, upon the short swell of ground between the lantern and the cliff edge, the keeper moved back and forth with methodical persistence, dragging long lengths of driftwood into a rough stack.
He worked without haste, though there was no idleness in him.
Once he paused, straightened, surveyed the sea, and bent again to his task.
She could not divine his purpose. The lantern would not be lit yet; it was still daylight, however diminished. But the wood was being stacked with intention—arranged, not stored. Whatever the custom, he was building something.
The wind moaned faintly at the windowpane. Elizabeth turned from it and moved to her trunk. She knelt beside it and lifted the lid.
The smell of cedar and starch rose at once, a small, stubborn defiance of the damp, wild air about her. At the top lay the folded linens she had been instructed to bring—two sets, neatly bound with twine. Whatever else had been misjudged about this place, that had not.
Beneath lay her gowns: dark wool, stout and serviceable; thicker petticoats; stockings fit for wind rather than promenade. There would be no need here for muslin or lace.
She drew them out one by one and shook them gently before laying them across what surfaces remained.
There was no dining table or desk; only a narrow settle stood against one wall, a single chair near the hearth.
She draped one gown across the back of the chair, another over the settle, spreading the sleeves so that the air might find them.
A cloak she hung upon the peg by the door.
At the bottom of the trunk lay the books.
She lifted them with greater care than she had afforded the gowns. They were wrapped in brown paper and bound with string. The string she untied slowly.
The first, she recognised by touch alone before she saw the spine.
Her father’s copy of Shakespeare, the margins crowded with his small, uneven hand.
She had taken it from the third shelf in the library at Longbourn on the afternoon Mr Collins had been shown over the estate.
It had not been theft, she told herself; it had been preservation.
She carried it to the mantel and set it there.
Next came Mary’s volume of sermons, annotated in her sister’s careful script. She placed it beside Shakespeare.
A small book of travels followed—one she had read often in girlhood, tracing imagined coastlines with her finger while her father described them in jest. She remembered the library windows thrown open in summer, the sound of bees in the garden beyond.
She set it with the others and stepped back.
There was no proper shelf to receive them, no ordered row. They leaned against one another upon the stone, the paper covers pale against the darker surface. She rested her hand upon the nearest spine.
The empty cottage echoed in a way her father’s library had not done. But Longbourn was no longer her home. The library windows would be closed up by Charlotte’s hands. The bees would find their way in just the same.
She withdrew and turned back to the trunk for the rest. Eleven books in all, including the one her uncle had rescued for her. After she had done, she braced her hands on her hips and cast a look about the room. Small as it was, the cottage deserved inspection before she permitted herself comfort.
Elizabeth moved slowly along the inner wall, studying the seam where roof met stone.
The light was already thinning; what little entered through the window lay flat and without warmth.
She could see no stain upon the floor—no darkened patches, no warping of the boards near the hearth.
The flags were clean, recently swept. If water had found its way through, it had not lingered.
She tilted her head and looked upward. The south side, Mrs Hargreaves had said.
There—a faint discoloration in the plaster just beneath the eaves, as though damp had once passed and been permitted to dry without remedy. She stepped closer, raised her hand, pressed her fingers lightly against the surface. It held firm.
If the leak were recent, it would show itself soon.
She crossed into the small kitchen space beyond. The shelves were bare. A hook where a kettle might once have hung stood empty. The hearth there was narrower than the one in the main room. She crouched and peered within.
The scent reached her before she identified it—dry grain and something faintly sour. Mice, most likely. A small scattering of husk lay near the wall. She did not recoil. Mice were not unknown at Longbourn in winter; they were a matter of management, not alarm. Perhaps she might acquire a cat.
She rose and returned to the window facing the headland.
The keeper was still at his work. He had constructed a low platform of sorts upon the knoll. The longer lengths of timber lay across it in careful alignment. He moved with the economy of one accustomed to solitude—no wasted motion, no glance toward the cottage.
The sky had deepened toward iron. The sea had lost its line.
She did not understand the keeper’s purpose, but she understood the hour. If she meant to eat before full dark, she must act.
She took up her cloak, fastened it, and unbolted the door. The wind struck her at once, cooler now, carrying the taste of rain not yet fallen. She closed the door behind her and set out toward the tower.
He was descending as she approached. His hands hung empty at his sides. His gaze passed over her without pause, fixed upon the ground ahead, and she saw him adjust his line—the smallest shift away from her path.
It would not do.
“Sir.” She did not raise her voice, but she did not soften it. “You mentioned stores at the tower. Where are they kept?”
He stopped. His jaw worked once before he turned. “The lower chamber. Through the door at the base. Shelves to the left.”
“And a lantern?”
His gaze moved briefly past her, toward the cottage, then back.
“There is a small one upon the table inside. You may use that. The larger must remain where it is.”
She followed the direction of his glance and saw a heavy brass lantern hanging from a hook near the entrance to the tower. “I have no intention of carrying off your apparatus.”
Something crossed his face—too brief to read—and he inclined his head once. He resumed his descent without further word.
She waited until he had gone several paces before continuing upward herself.
The door at the base of the tower opened upon a chamber far smaller than she had imagined.
Scarcely more than an entry and stair, the stone walls close about her.
To one side stood a narrow table bearing a small lantern, as promised.
Opposite, rough shelves had been fixed into the wall.
Upon them lay sacks of flour, a crock of salt, a small wheel of cheese, a loaf wrapped in cloth, a few onions, a joint of cured meat.
There was also a cot against the far wall, neatly made, a blanket folded at its foot. A single chair stood near it. Upon the table beside the lantern lay two or three books, stacked without ornament, a sheaf of letters weighted by a stone.
She paused. This, then, was where he slept. A cot, a chair, a table, a shelf of provisions. Everything reduced to function.
The cottage would have been more comfortable, would it not?
More spacious, certainly. But here was his habitation: narrow, austere, sufficient.
He had remained within the tower rather than repair the house below.
Whether by choice or by the slow accretion of years in which no one required him to choose, she could not say.
But then, her new situation was not one of luxury, either. She had just draped her own gowns across a settle and a chair because there was nothing else to receive them. The distance between his austerity and hers was shorter than she would have supposed that morning.
She did not touch the letters. She did not examine the books beyond noting that they bore no gilded spines. They were used, not displayed.
Through the small window, she saw him again, bending to lift another length of driftwood.
Soon it would be dark, and the beam would sweep the water the way her uncle had described it—slow, steady, turning in its broad arc across the reef.
She would see it from her window tonight.
The one thing on this headland that would not require her to fight for it.
She moved quickly. It would not do to be found here alone.
He was too tall, his shoulders too broad—why, he could flick his wrist and sweep her into his arms and do heaven-knew-what with her before she would be able to draw breath to cry for help.
And he was young—far younger than she had bargained for.
Surely, less than thirty. Her uncle had described lantern keepers as invariable old salts, wizened by the sea.
This man was… well, there was nothing wizened about him, and he had eyes that already pieced her too cleanly.
She had no way of knowing what manner of man he was, but the cottage promised locks on the windows and a bolt on the door.
From the shelves she selected a modest portion of cheese, a heel of bread, two onions. She hesitated, then added a small measure of flour. The lantern she lifted carefully from the table, testing its weight. It held oil. It would serve.
She closed the door behind her and descended the slope with greater haste than dignity, the wind tugging at her cloak as though determined to question her decision.
The keeper was walking up just now, another length of timber on his shoulder. He did not look up as he passed.