Chapter Sixteen #2
They climbed back to the tower in silence.
She went to the cot. He went to the stair.
The arrangement had become so habitual that neither of them remarked upon it, and the absence of remark was itself a kind of intimacy—the shared understanding that some things did not require acknowledgment in order to be understood.
The second night was the stone. He carried rubble to the barrow; she wheeled it out and dumped it behind the cottage, where the ground fell away toward the cliff.
Load after load, until her arms shook and her hands were raw and the hearth lay exposed in its full ruin—the grate buried, the firebrick cracked, the chimney opening black and gaping.
On the third night, the freestone arrived.
She did not ask how. Two cartloads, stacked beside the cottage door when they descended, with a sack of lime and a bucket of sand.
He mixed the mortar with the competence of someone who had at least seen it done before—not expertly, but capably—and he began laying stone against the chimney opening while she held the lantern and passed him materials.
They worked within arm’s reach of each other.
The cottage was not large enough to permit anything else, and the chimney wall required two people—one to hold the stone in position while the mortar set, one to apply the next course.
Her hands learned the rhythm of his: he worked steadily, without haste, testing each stone before placing it, smoothing the mortar with his thumb.
His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, and the lantern light caught the cords of his forearms where they moved.
She kept her eyes on the stone and did not look at anything else. “You have done this before,” she said.
“Not this specifically.”
“But something like it?”
“I have repaired walls. On another property. Some years ago.”
“Whose property?”
He applied mortar to the next stone and did not answer.
She passed him the stone and did not ask again, and the question joined the others in the growing catalogue of things she knew to pursue and things she knew to leave alone, and the line between them was less clear than it had been a fortnight ago.
The chimney took four nights. When it was finished—rough, functional, unmistakably a repair in progress rather than a ruin—they stood in the cottage and surveyed the result.
The floor was dry. The rubble was gone. The mantel, or what remained of it, had been propped against the wall with a piece of timber that suggested intention rather than collapse.
Her trunk she had dragged to the corner and opened, and the ruined gowns she had spread across the settle and the chair as though drying them, which gave the room the appearance of habitation even if the habitation had been uncomfortable.
“It will not survive close inspection,” he said.
“It does not need to survive close inspection. It needs to survive a surveyor who has been sent by trustees who do not want to spend money and who will therefore be looking for reasons to approve the property rather than condemn the buildings and order them replaced.”
He looked at her. “You are remarkably cynical about the motives of your own trustees.”
“My trustees have frozen the endowment for twenty years rather than maintain the property because they claimed they did not have the authority. Cynicism is the minimum rational response.”
The ghost of something crossed his face—not a smile, not amusement, but a recognition. As though she had said something that aligned with a principle he held but did not expect to encounter in another person. It vanished before she could be certain of it.
“The roof next,” she said.
“The roof will have to wait. The seam is below the eave and not visible from inside if we board the ceiling.”
She looked up at the wet plaster, the dark stain spreading across the surface. “Can you board a ceiling?”
“I can board a ceiling.”
“Then we will board it tomorrow night, and the night after that I will sleep here.”
He turned his head. “Here? But you cannot use the chimney. It is barely dry. You will take ill.”
“The surveyor may arrive early. If he finds me in the tower—”
“He will not find you in the tower because I will not permit him in the tower.”
“You may not have a choice. His remit includes ‘all buildings, records, and personnel.’ You are personnel.”
The word landed with the weight of a truth neither of them had confronted. He was her keeper. She was his steward. The trust bound them in a hierarchy that neither of them observed in practice but that the surveyor would expect to find intact.
“I will be sleeping here by the night before the inspection,” she said.
“One night, at least. To establish the appearance of residence. I will light a small fire—the chimney should draw now, if your masonry holds after having set for a few days—and I will leave evidence of habitation. After the inspection... I suppose I will return to the tower, if the roof behaves as I think it will.”
He said nothing. He picked up the barrow handles and wheeled the last load of broken stone out through the door, and the night closed over the cottage, and above them the tower stood dark against the stars with its dead lamp and its useless lens and the pyre burning on the knoll like a promise made to a sea that had not yet decided whether to accept it.