Chapter Fifteen
The letters came up with Robson's youngest on a Tuesday, tucked inside the canvas sack that held the week’s provisions and a tin of the tea she preferred.
He heard the boy’s whistle on the path before he saw him—James the younger, fifteen, cheerful to the point of affliction, who made the climb three times a week and always announced himself as though the headland were a stage and he its most devoted audience.
The keeper met him at the tower door and took the sack, and the boy lingered the way he always lingered, craning his neck for a glimpse of the gallery above or the steward within.
“Letters in the bottom,” young James said. “Two for you, one for Miss Bennet, and one from Newcastle that’s marked for the pair of you.”
“Thank you.”
“Is Miss Bennet about? Ma sent up a jar of—”
“She is in the village. You may leave the jar.”
The boy set the jar on the step—gooseberry preserve, from the look of it—and descended with a backward glance that suggested he would have preferred to deliver it in person. The keeper watched him go, then carried the sack inside and emptied it upon the table.
Four letters. He sorted them in his hand.
The first bore the seal of Hathaway it was addressed to her, and he did not open what was not his.
The second was from the Heaton foundry in Newcastle and was addressed to The Keeper, Blackscar Light, per the Steward, Blackscar Trust—a formulation that would have been addressed to him alone a month ago, and that now bore Miss Bennet’s title like a second lock upon the door. He set this beside the first.
The third and fourth he held.
His sister’s hand was unmistakable. She wrote in the sloping, generous script her governess had drilled into her from the age of six—a hand that belonged to drawing rooms and morning correspondence and the kind of life that produced letters on cream paper sealed with wax the colour of claret.
The letter was thick. She had written at length, which meant she was either very well or very worried, and neither possibility could be examined in a moment.
The fourth bore no seal. It was written in the same hand that had addressed him every quarter for five years—even, methodical, the penmanship of someone trained to correspondence long before he was born.
He stood at the table with both letters in his hands and did not open either. Both would require reading in solitude, at length, and the answers they demanded—if he permitted himself to give answer—would require more than the minute or two before Miss Bennet returned from the village.
He was still holding them when the door opened behind him.
He turned. She stood in the doorway with the wind at her back and the empty basket swinging at her side, and her gaze went to the table—to the sorted letters, to the Lincoln’s Inn seal, to the foundry correspondence—and then to his hands, where his sister’s letter lay uppermost, its cream paper and claret wax and unmistakably feminine script displayed as plainly as if he had set it on a shelf for her inspection.
Her eyes moved across the handwriting. He saw it register—not comprehension, but interest. A woman’s hand, elegant, intimate, on correspondence addressed to a man who claimed no attachments and kept no company and had given her a false name rather than surrender a single fact about himself.
The corner of her mouth moved. A small, private alteration—not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the kind of expression a woman produces when she has noticed something interesting and has chosen, for now, to say nothing about it.
He put both letters inside his coat.
The motion was too swift. He knew it as he made it—the haste betraying what composure would have concealed.
A man with nothing to hide does not pocket his correspondence like a boy caught with a stolen apple.
But the letters were inside his coat now, and his hand was at his side, and too much had been seen and too little said, as was always the way between them.
“Letters?” she asked, as though she had noticed nothing at all.
“Yours is there. The one with the Lincoln’s Inn seal.”
She crossed to the table and picked it up, turning it in her hands. “And have we heard from the foundry?”
“Beside it.”
She took the foundry letter and held it without opening it. “This is addressed to both of us.”
“I am aware.”
“Then we shall open it together.”
She broke the seal and unfolded the page, and he moved to stand beside her because the alternative—standing across the room while she read aloud—would have ceded a degree of authority he was not prepared to yield. They read in silence. The letter was brief, businesslike, and unwelcome.
Dear Madam and Sir,
We acknowledge receipt of your order for one (1) replacement collar, Heaton design, to the specifications of the most recent Blackscar commission (1753).
We regret to advise that the casting has been delayed owing to a fault in the mould, which must be recut before production may proceed.
We anticipate dispatch within six to eight weeks from the date of this letter.
Your obedient servants, &c.
“Six to eight weeks,” she breathed.
“I can read.”
“We only have a fortnight left. This collar will not arrive within a fortnight.”
“We knew it would not.”
She set the letter upon the table and pressed both hands flat upon its surface, and he watched what it cost her to master the composure.
Six to eight weeks. The collar that did not need replacing would not arrive in time to sustain the fiction that it did, and Tull’s deadline would pass with the mechanism still dark and the report still open and Trinity House still waiting for a resolution that a brass collar had never been able to provide.
“I will write to the foundry again,” she said. “I will explain the urgency. I will offer to pay for expedited work.”
“With what funds? The trustees have not released the endowment.”
“You do not know that.” She looked at the Lincoln’s Inn letter still unopened in her other hand.
She broke the seal and read it standing, her lips moving faintly, and he saw the contents unfold in her face—a thinning of her mouth, a stillness in her hands that spoke louder than anything she might have said.
“They have declined,” she said. “The trustees have declined to release repair funds until they have received a surveyor’s report on the condition of the property. They are sending an assessor.”
“When?”
“They do not say. They say, ‘at the earliest convenience,’ which in the language of trustees means whenever it suits their purpose and not a day before. How do they have the authority to delay when I am the one with the authority to command the funds?”
He shook his head. “You have known them less than a month. I assure you, Miss Bennet, this is, indeed, their way.”
She folded the letter and placed it beside the foundry correspondence, and the two documents sat upon the table like a pair of doors closing simultaneously—the mechanical solution delayed, the financial solution denied, and the month blowing away in the wind between them.
“We will manage Tull,” she said. “I will explain the foundry delay, and I will request an extension.”
“Tull does not grant extensions. He files reports.”
“Then I will give him a report worth filing. The collar is ordered. The pyre is maintained. The steward is in residence, and the keeper is at his post. Tull is a reasonable man.”
“Tull is a man with a duty to the coast, and his duty does not include patience.”
She looked at him, and something in her expression shifted—not softening, not warmth, but the grim recognition of two people standing on the same side of a problem neither of them had chosen. “Then we had better give him something other than patience to work with.”
She took up the pen—his pen—and began to write.
He read his sister’s letter on the gallery floor at midnight, with the hand-lantern beside his knee and the mechanism ticking its useless rotation above him.
Dearest Brother,
I write without any assurance that this letter will find you, as the last three have not been returned, but neither have they been answered.
I choose to believe that you received them and that your silence is the silence of a man occupied with important work rather than a man who has forgot he has a sister.
He closed his eyes briefly, then read on.
My aunt has authorised a visit to Bath for the autumn, and we have taken a house in the Crescent that suits us very well. Uncle says the waters will improve my constitution, though my constitution is perfectly sound, and I suspect the true purpose is to improve my spirits, which are less so.
Bath is diverting enough. I practise. I walk. I attend the assemblies when my aunt insists, which is more often than I should like. I am told I play well and that I ought to smile more, which is advice I receive with the same regularity and the same indifference.
We return to London for Christmastide. My aunt is determined upon it, and I confess I am glad, for the house feels more like home than anywhere else has these past two years.
I will not ask you to join us. You have made your position clear, and I respect it, though I do not understand it and cannot pretend to.
But if you were to come—if you found that the season permitted it—I should like it very much.
I should like it more than I can say in a letter you may not read.
He turned the page. Her handwriting loosened as the letter continued—the careful slopes giving way to a freer hand, as though the act of writing to him had gradually released something she kept governed in company.
I do not ask you to come home. I know better than to ask what has been refused. But I ask you to write. One page. One line. Anything that tells me you are alive and that the sea has not taken you as it takes everything else upon that coast.
Your sister, G.