Chapter Sixteen
The reply from Beadnell arrived on a Thursday, inside a packet Garrett Shaw left at the Anchor with the publican’s wife.
Elizabeth collected it on her way through the village, tucking it inside the basket beneath the bread and the tin of tea, and she did not open it until she had climbed the western path and passed the tower and descended the far side of the headland to the place where the cliff path turned and the rock offered a ledge wide enough to sit upon, facing south, out of the wind.
The harbourmaster’s hand was cramped and practical, the writing of a man who composed correspondence as seldom as possible and resented the necessity.
Miss Bennet,
I have made inquiries as requested regarding persons lost or recovered along the coast between Bamburgh and Beadnell in the period you describe.
No body was recovered by this office nor reported to the magistrate at Bamburgh during the months of April through December of last year, nor in the months since.
However, I have spoken to one Amos Firth, who fishes out of Seahouses, and he recalls that a boat working the Farne Channel in late July or early August pulled something from the water that may have been a person.
Firth did not see this himself. He heard it from a man at Seahouses whose name he cannot now recall, and who may have heard it from another.
I relay this with the caution it warrants.
If you wish to pursue the matter further, I suggest writing to the harbourmaster at Seahouses directly, as his jurisdiction covers the Farne Islands and the channels between.
Your servant, &c. J. Pollard, Harbour Office, Beadnell
She read it twice. Then a third time, tracing each line with her finger as though the pressure of her hand upon the page might force the words into something more solid than hearsay layered upon hearsay.
A boat pulled something from the water. May have been a person. A man whose name he cannot recall. Heard it from another.
It was nothing. A rumour of a rumour, the kind of story that circulates along any coast where the sea gives and takes and the men who work it remember imprecisely. It proved nothing. It promised nothing.
She folded the letter and put it inside the journal. Then she looked south along the coast where the cliffs curved toward Craster and the beaches opened and the Farne Islands sat on the horizon like a low line of dark teeth.
Eighteen months. Jane had been gone eighteen months. And somewhere along this coast, a boat had pulled something from the water in the weeks after she disappeared, and no one had thought to record what it was.
She wrote to the harbourmaster at Seahouses that evening, by candlelight, on the keeper’s paper, and did not tell him why.
The assessor’s letter arrived two days later.
She read it aloud at the table because the contents concerned them both, and because reading aloud prevented her from feeding it to the fire.
“Mr Gerald Norwood, surveyor, appointed by Hathaway and Crane on behalf of the Blackscar Trust, will attend the property on or about the fourteenth of next month to conduct a full assessment of the tower, the cottage, the apparatus, and all associated structures.” She turned the page.
“He will require access to all buildings, records, and personnel.”
William stood by the window. “The fourteenth.”
“Three weeks.”
“And he will require access to the cottage.”
She set the letter upon the table. They looked at each other across the small room, and neither spoke, because the problem was the same one they had both been avoiding and could no longer afford to.
The cottage. The door still wired shut. The chimney rubble still covering the floor.
The standing water, the split mantel, the ruined trunk.
Three weeks of rain and wind had not improved matters—if anything, the south seam had opened further, and the water on the floor would be deeper now than when he had inspected it on the first morning.
A surveyor would open that door and see the truth of it in a single glance: that the steward had not occupied the cottage at any point since her arrival, that the structure had been uninhabitable from the first night, and that everything she had told the trustees about chimney repairs and mason’s assessments had been—to use her own generous terminology—re-sequenced.
“We cannot let him see it as it stands,” she said.
“No.”
“Clark, the stonemason, could do the work. But Clark would have to go inside. He would see the damage, and he would know that I have been... managing the narrative.”
“You have been lying.”
“I have been omitting. But you are correct that the distinction will not survive Robson’s first glance at the chimney.”
She stood and moved to the window beside him. The cottage sat fifty paces south, its door shut, its exterior placid and deceiving. From here, it looked like what it was supposed to be: a small stone house, weather-beaten but whole, occupied by a steward who came and went each day.
“What if Clark does not go inside?” she said.
He looked at her.
“What if we do the work ourselves? The drainage, the rubble, the worst of the roof. Not a full repair—Norwood will expect some evidence of wear and ongoing maintenance. But enough to remove the evidence of collapse. Enough to show a cottage that has been inhabited, if imperfectly.”
“You propose that we rebuild a chimney in three weeks. The two of us.”
“I propose that we clear the rubble, drain the floor, board the chimney opening to suggest a repair in progress, and move my trunk to a position that implies use rather than abandonment. We are not building. We are staging.”
He was quiet. She saw him working through the logistics—the weight of the stone, the volume of water, the labour involved in making a ruin look like a residence. He had assessed the damage himself on the first morning. He knew what the cottage required better than she did.
“The masonry is beyond what we can do without tools and materials,” he said. “The rubble can be cleared by hand, but the chimney breast must be made to look as though it is being repaired, not simply demolished. That requires stone, mortar, and at minimum a basic knowledge of bricklaying.”
“Do you have that knowledge?”
“I have built fire pits from loose stone and driftwood every night for almost a month. The principle is not dissimilar.”
“And the materials? If I order stone and mortar through Clark, he will want to know what they are for. If I tell him the chimney needs patching, he will insist on seeing it himself.”
The keeper crossed the room to the shelf where the oil tins stood. He adjusted one that did not require adjusting. “I will see what can be done about materials.”
She waited. The sentence carried a mystery she could not account for—not in the words themselves, which were ordinary, but in the way he delivered them: without looking at her, without elaboration, with the clipped finality of a man closing a subject he did not intend to reopen.
“How?”
“There is freestone in the quarry above the village. Mortar can be mixed from sand and lime. Both can be obtained without involving Clark directly.”
“Obtained how? The quarry is not unattended. Someone will see.”
“The quarry is attended by Samuel Greer, who sells stone by the cartload to anyone with coin and does not ask questions about the purpose.” He still did not look at her. “I will arrange it.”
She studied the back of his head. He was offering to pay for materials he had no obligation to provide, from funds he should not possess, for a purpose that served her interests more than his.
She had seen his quarters—the single blanket, the coat folded for a pillow, the shelf with three books and a wooden box.
A man who lived with so little should not have been able to produce coin for stone without hesitation.
And yet the brass inkwell on his table was not tin.
The pen was good quality. The hand-lantern was finer than anything the trust would have supplied.
She filed this beside the handwriting, the almost-gentrified accent, the woman’s letter, the quarterly correspondence. The list was growing longer, and the shape it was beginning to suggest was one she could not yet afford to examine.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Do not thank me. I am protecting the same fiction you are.”
“Of course.”
He went out. She heard his boots on the path toward the knoll, and then the familiar rhythm of timber striking timber as he began the evening’s pyre.
She stood at the window and watched him work, and the gratitude she was not permitted to express sat behind her ribs alongside the Beadnell letter and the journal and every other thing she carried on this headland that had no safe place to be set down.
They worked in the cottage at night.
After the pyre was lit and the gallery had swallowed him for his hours of futile labour, they descended together—she with the hand-lantern, he with a barrow he had borrowed from somewhere he did not specify—and they entered the ruined cottage and began.
The first night was drainage. He dug a channel from the low point of the floor to the door with a spade that had appeared beside the barrow, and she swept the water toward it with the broom Mrs Hargreaves had left on the path weeks ago.
The work was cold, wet, and wretched. Her hem was black within the first hour.
His shirt was soaked through. They did not speak except to coordinate— “lift there,” “the corner next,” “mind the stone”—and the cottage echoed with the scrape of tools and the sluice of water and the wind finding its way through the open seam above.
By midnight, the floor was drained to damp. They stood in the doorway and looked at what they had done by the light of the hand-lantern, and the room looked worse without the water—the rubble more stark, the damage more plain, the split mantel hanging from the wall like a broken limb.
“Tomorrow the rubble,” he said.
“Tomorrow.”