Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
She wrote the letters on the ninth evening, after he had climbed the stair and the gallery had swallowed him for the night.
The fire burned low. She sat at his table with his pen in her hand and his ink in the well and a candle borrowed from the shelf above the cot, and she divided her family into two pages, because her family had divided itself long before she left it.
The first was for Meryton. For Mama and Lydia, and the Philipses, who would be reading over their shoulders.
She wrote carefully. She described the headland in terms that would occupy Mama’s attention without alarming her: the village, the harbour, the quality of the local bread, the kindness of Mrs Hargreaves.
She mentioned the tower only as property she was learning to manage. She mentioned the keeper not at all.
And she did not mention the lantern.
She wrote that she was well, that the air agreed with her, that the coastal walks were invigorating, and that she had every confidence the trust would be brought to good order within due season. She signed it with love and set it aside to dry.
The second letter was harder.
She wrote to Uncle Gardiner first, because the practical matters belonged to him: the state of the cottage, which she described as requiring chimney repair and roof work, without specifying the scale of the damage.
The need for mason’s funds to be released through the trust. The condition of the endowment, which she had not yet been permitted to examine, but which she intended to pursue through the trustees directly.
She asked him to write to Mr Rotherdam at Lincoln’s Inn and request a full accounting of the trust’s finances since the stewardship had lapsed.
Then she turned the page and wrote to Mary and Kitty together, because they had become, in the months since Papa’s death and Jane’s disappearance, the steadiest ground she had.
The headland is as wild as anything in the novels Mary refuses to read, and Kitty devours by the armful.
The village is small and suspicious of strangers, which I respect, as I am suspicious of strangers myself and have been one for some time now.
The keeper is a man of few words and fewer courtesies, which suits me admirably, as I have had my fill of both.
She paused. The candle guttered in a draught from the stair. Above her, the stone carried nothing—no sound, no vibration, only the knowledge that somewhere in the dark above, a very stubborn man was striking flint against steel and failing and striking again.
I have found a previous steward’s journal.
Miss Hale was a remarkable woman, and I think Mary would admire her very much.
She kept this light for thirty-one years and recorded everything she observed with a rigour that would satisfy even Mary’s standards of evidence.
I am reading it slowly, because I suspect what it contains will matter a great deal, and I do not wish to arrive at conclusions before the evidence permits them.
Kitty, tell Aunt Gardiner the tea here could strip the varnish from a sideboard. She will know what to send.
She set the pen down and flexed her hand. The ink was drying on the page, and the room was very quiet, and the fire had sunk to a bed of ember that would need tending before she slept.
Mama’s last letter sat unopened in the pile Mrs Hargreaves had brought up three days ago.
She had read the others—Uncle Gardiner’s brief, businesslike note confirming receipt of her arrival; Mary’s single page of careful questions about the trust’s legal structure; Kitty’s three pages of gossip, London observations, and a postscript asking whether there were any handsome men in Northumberland, underlined twice.
She had not opened Mama’s. She should have, before she wrote, but she knew already what it would say, and had not the strength before.
She picked it up now. The hand on the outside was her mother's looping, agitated script, the ink pressed deep where emotion had driven the pen. She broke the seal.
My dearest Lizzy,
I cannot sleep for thinking of you upon that dreadful coast. Twenty miles!
You are scarcely twenty miles from the place where your sister was taken from us, and I cannot fathom why my brother permitted you to go, nor why you should wish to place yourself in the very jaws of the same cruel waters that swallowed my Jane.
She set the letter down to take a moment, force air into her lungs. Picked it up again.
Your father would never have allowed it.
But your father is gone, and no one listens to me, and I am left here with only Lydia for company, and Lydia is no comfort, for she talks of nothing but officers and lace, and I am quite alone in my suffering.
Mrs Long called yesterday and said she supposed you had gone to recover your sister’s body, which I thought very unkind, and I told her so, and she has not been back, which is the only mercy I have received this twelvemonth.
Lydia sends her love, though she does not say so. She is angry with you for leaving, which she expresses by refusing to speak of you at all, which is how I know she is angry, because Lydia never stops speaking of anything unless the thing has hurt her.
Please come home. There is nothing upon that coast but grief and cold water, and I could not bear to lose another daughter to it.
Your loving Mama
Elizabeth folded the letter and placed it beneath the Shakespeare.
Her hands did not shake much. Her breathing was almost even.
The room had grown familiar around her—fire, table, stone, the smell of coal and ink and the faint mineral trace of his brass polish—and she sat inside these things and did not permit the letter to dismantle what she had built.
Jane was not dead.
She did not know this. She had no evidence of it.
But the alternative—the alternative that Mama had accepted and Mrs Long had codified into neighbourhood fact and that everyone except Elizabeth had folded into the settled architecture of their grief—that alternative she would not carry.
Not here. Not while she still possessed the distraction of a darkened lantern, and the sea kept its counsel, and twenty miles of coastline lay between this tower and the place where her sister had last been seen.
She tended the fire. She folded the letters she had written and sealed them with a drop of his candle wax, pressing her thumb into the soft surface because she had no seal of her own. She placed them at the edge of the table where she would remember to take them down to the village in the morning.
Then she lay down upon the cot and pulled the blanket to her shoulders and closed her eyes.
Mrs Hargreaves came up on the tenth day with a basket, a broom, and the expression of a woman who had been restraining herself for longer than her constitution permitted.
Elizabeth met her on the path. She had learned by now to intercept rather than receive—to be already walking, already in motion, already offering a question or an errand that might redirect whatever Mrs Hargreaves had been composing on the climb.
It did not work today.
“I’ve come to turn out the cottage,” Mrs Hargreaves announced, already bearing left at the fork. “The linens will want airing by now, and if the chimney’s still smoking, I’ll have a look at the draught myself. I’ve cleared worse flues than that one.”
“That is very kind, but there is no need. I have been managing.”
“Managing.” Mrs Hargreaves did not slow.
“You’ve been managing without a working fire for ten days.
You’re cooking at the tower—don’t think I haven’t seen the smoke from the keeper’s chimney at odd hours—and you come down each morning looking as though you’ve slept in a hedge.
The place wants a proper cleaning, and I mean to give it one. ”
Elizabeth lengthened her stride and drew alongside.
The fork was twenty paces ahead. The cottage path lay to the left, its door wired shut behind a latch that would not survive a determined push, its interior a ruin of water and rubble that would end every fiction she had constructed in the past ten days.
“Mrs Hargreaves, I must ask you not to.”
The older woman stopped. “Not to what?”
“Not to go to the cottage. Not today.”
“Why on earth not?”
Because the chimney breast is shattered across the floor.
Because the roof has opened and the water stands an inch deep.
Because my trunk is a sodden wreck and my gowns are ruined and I have been sleeping on the keeper’s cot for nine nights running.
Because if you open that door, you will see all of this, and you will march me down to the village, and the trustees will hear of it, and everything I have built here will collapse as thoroughly as the masonry.
“Because I have written to the trustees about the chimney repair,” Elizabeth said quickly, “and I do not wish anyone disturbing the cottage until the mason has assessed the damage. The flue may be structurally unsound. I would not forgive myself if you went in to clean it and something gave way.”
Mrs Hargreaves studied her with the unhurried suspicion of a woman who had raised four children and buried a husband and could smell an evasion the way a hound smells a fox. “Structurally unsound? Why, you oughtn't be in there yourself!”
“Oh, no, it is not a matter of safety so long as it is not disturbed, but I am certain that a cleaning such as you mean to administer would do it no good. The chimney smoked badly enough to suggest a crack in the breast. I am not a mason, and I will not have anyone touching the chimney until one has looked at it.”
“And in the meantime? You’re living up there without a fire for cooking, without clean linens, without so much as a—”