Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The west track was worse than she had judged from the window.
In the dark before dawn, with the mist sitting low on the headland and the grass still sodden from the storm, the path dropped steeply along the shoulder of the hill, following a sheep trail cut into the slope by generations of animals with a surer footing than hers.
Twice she lost the track where the ground fell away into loose scree, and once her boot found nothing beneath it for a terrible half-second before the earth returned.
She wore the same gown, stiff and faintly sour from the rain and from sleeping in it for two nights. Her cloak was still a ruin on the cottage floor, so the wind took the warmth from her without obstacle.
By the time she reached the lower ground where the track met the broader path along the harbour, her hands were numb and her hem was black with mud. She stopped where the two paths converged and looked back up the hill.
The tower stood against the paling sky, its column dark, its gallery windows catching the first grey light without returning it.
No beam swept the water. No lamp burned behind the glass.
It was an absence so large it seemed to have substance—a hole in the coastline where something essential had been removed.
She turned toward the village, walked two hundred yards along the harbour road until she reached the well at its southern edge, and then turned back.
The eastern path rose gently from the village, wide enough for a cart, visible from the harbour and from any boat at anchor below.
She climbed it at a pace that suggested purpose without urgency—a steward about her morning rounds, nothing more.
The harbour lay to her left, its water flat and grey in the early light.
Two fishing boats sat at their moorings.
A third was already moving toward the mouth, its sail dark against the mist.
Halfway up, she passed a boy driving a goat along the verge. He looked at her with frank curiosity. “Morning, miss.”
“Good morning.” She smiled widely at him.
“You’re the one from the tower?”
“I am the steward, yes.”
He considered this. The goat pulled at its tether. “Da’ says the light’s out.”
She nodded with what she hoped was sufficient warmth to satisfy a child without inviting further questions. “It is. The light is being repaired.”
“Da’ says Wickie’s gone queer.”
“Your father is mistaken. The keeper is managing the situation with considerable skill.” She nodded to the boy and continued up the hill before the conversation could develop further.
The tower door was shut when she reached it. She pushed it open and stepped inside.
He was not in the lower room. The fire burned low in the grate—he had tended it at some point during the hour she had been gone—and the cot bore the impression of where she had lain.
Her books remained on the table. His logbook was open to a fresh page, the ink still damp, and she looked at the entry for precisely as long as it took to confirm she could not read his hand at this angle, which was not quite long enough to constitute a violation of the promise she had made to herself not to invade his privacy.
His boots sounded on the stair. She counted not his footfalls, which the stone swallowed, but the change in the air as someone descended from the colder upper reaches into the warmth below. He emerged from the stairwell with his coat over his arm and stopped when he saw her.
“You were seen?” he said.
“By a boy with a goat, who informed me that his father thinks you’ve gone queer.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It did not survive long enough to be classified. “That would be Peter, Calder’s youngest. He tells everyone everything.”
“Then he has told himself and will soon tell others that the steward walks up from the cottage each morning before breakfast. That is all to the good.”
She moved to the hearth and crouched before it, feeding the fire with coal from the bucket. “I will go down to the village this morning. Mrs Hargreaves will expect me. I need provisions, and I need to be seen doing ordinary things in ordinary places.”
He said nothing.
“Is there anything you require from below?”
“No.”
She stood and faced him. He had put his coat on and stood by the door with the look of a man about to vacate his own quarters because they were no longer entirely his—and finding the necessity intolerable, and governing the intolerability with an economy of movement she was beginning to catalogue as his first language.
“I cannot keep calling you William if it is not your name.”
His hand stilled on the door frame. “It will serve.”
“It will serve you. It does not serve me. I am lying to a harbour warden about a brass collar, managing a cover story for a collapsed cottage, and sleeping on your cot. If I am to do all of that, I should at least know the name of the man whose reputation I am protecting alongside my own.”
“You are protecting the trust. My name is immaterial to the trust.”
“Your name is material to someone who must work beside you.”
He opened the door. The morning air entered, and with it the sound of the sea and the distant knock of a boat against the harbour wall. “William is sufficient, Miss Bennet. I have nothing else to offer on the matter.”
She held his gaze longer than the exchange required—long enough that he would know she was not yielding the point, only deferring it—then took up the dead lantern she had carried from the cottage, the small one, still sitting by the door where she had set it that first night, and held it toward him.
“Might I have oil for this? It will serve on the west track in the mornings.”
He sighed and took the lantern from her hand without touching her fingers. He turned to the shelf where the oil tins stood, poured a measured amount, and trimmed the wick with a small blade before returning it.
She watched him work the wick. The blade moved with the same economy he brought to every task—no wasted motion, no hesitation.
It was the competence of a man who had been trained, and trained well, and by someone who did not tolerate imprecision.
She was assembling a list of such observations, and the list did not yet point anywhere she could name, but it grew longer with each hour she spent in this tower.
“The wick was fouled,” he said. “Rain got into the housing. It will burn now.”
She took it from him and left without thanking him, because thanks had become a currency she could not spend without altering the terms of whatever stood between them, and the terms were already more complicated than she could afford.
She descended toward the village by the western path, the little lantern swinging at her side, in full view of anyone who cared to watch.
Mrs Hargreaves’ son was called Robert, and he kept a house at the upper end of the village that smelled of dried fish and turpentine.
His wife, Anne, was a woman of few words and many opinions, all of which she communicated through the angle of her brows and the velocity with which she placed things on the table.
Elizabeth sat in their kitchen and ate porridge with salt, which was how it was served here, and drank tea that was stronger than anything her aunt had ever brewed, and submitted herself to Mrs Hargreaves’ inspection with the patience of someone undergoing a necessary procedure.
“You look as though you’ve not slept.”
“The cottage is draughty, as you warned. I rose early.”
“I told you. I told you, and I told your uncle—”
“You did, and you were right. I have a letter for the trustees requesting that the chimney be examined by a mason. I have the authority to order repairs, but the funds must come through the trust. In the meantime, I am spending my waking hours familiarising myself with the property.”
Mrs Hargreaves looked at Anne. Anne’s brows communicated something between vindication and resignation.
“You’ll stay here tonight,” Mrs Hargreaves said. It was not a question.
“I may. The day is long and I cannot say what it will require.” Elizabeth sipped the tea and set the cup down. “Tell me about the keeper.”
Mrs Hargreaves blinked. “Wickie?”
“How did he come to the post?”
“Applied for it, I’m told. After old Ridley died. The trustees put out word through the usual channels, and he came up from—well, I don’t know where from, if I’m honest. He arrived with a letter from the trustees and a sea chest and not much else.”
“No references? No family?”
“If he had references, he showed them to the trustees, not to me. Family—none that he’s spoken of. He’s a private man, Miss Bennet. Five years here and I couldn’t tell you where he was born.”
Elizabeth turned her cup on the table. “And the village simply accepted him?”
“He does the work. That’s what matters up here.
Ridley was a talker—half the village knew his business before he did.
Wickie’s the opposite. Keeps to himself.
Tends the light. Doesn’t drink, doesn’t brawl, doesn’t come down except for stores.
” Mrs Hargreaves paused. “Some folk think that’s odd. Most just think it’s his way.”
“And you?”
Mrs Hargreaves met her gaze. “I think a man who tends a lighthouse for five years without complaint and without company is either the most dutiful soul on this coast or the most troubled. And I’ve never asked which, because it’s not my business.”
Anne set a plate of bread and butter between them without comment.
“Very well. Tell me about the lantern,” Elizabeth said.
The shift in subject worked because Mrs Hargreaves, for all her bluntness, loved to talk about what she knew, and she knew Blackscar.
She had been born within sight of the tower.
Her mother had served as housekeeper to the last active life-long steward before Prudence Gardiner—a woman named Marian Hale, Elizabeth’s great-aunt by some degree of removal, who had lived on the headland for thirty-one years and died there in winter.