Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
“How many gulls do you suppose are on the water?”
He looked down at the top of her head. Her hair was plastered against her skull, dark with salt water, and the smell of it was brine and sand and nothing else.
“What?”
“The gulls. On the water. Out there.” She did not lift her head from his chest. “I am trying to make conversation, and I find myself at a disadvantage, as I cannot see anything from this position except your shirt, which is not a rich subject.”
He stared at the rock wall opposite. “You nearly drowned.”
“Yes. And now I am cold and frightened, and if I do not speak, I will think about it, and I would rather not think about it. So.” A breath. A smaller shiver. “The gulls.”
“I cannot see the gulls from here.”
“Then the clouds. What shape are the clouds? You can see them from your side.”
He looked through the opening of the cleft. The sky had thickened since they had climbed up—a low, grey blanket that sat upon the water without distinction. “There are no shapes. The cloud is uniform.”
“That is a very dull answer.”
“It is an accurate answer.”
“Accuracy and dullness are not mutually exclusive. You might say the cloud resembles a vast grey counterpane drawn over the sea by someone who wished the sea to sleep. That would be accurate and interesting.”
“I would not say that.”
“No. You would not.” Her teeth still chattered, but her voice had levelled out somewhat. The shivering still ran through them both, but she spoke around it with a determination that he was beginning to recognise as her primary mode of survival—if her body failed, her tongue would carry on.
“Do you know,” she said, “I believe this is the longest we have been in each other’s company without arguing about the lantern.”
“We have been in each other’s company for just over three weeks.”
“Yes, and every conversation has eventually returned to brass and oil and the tolerances of the wick mechanism. This is refreshing. We should nearly drown more often.”
“That is not amusing.”
“It is slightly amusing.” She shifted against him, and the movement brought her closer, the shape of her more snugly inside the sensitive parts of his arms, and the fists against his chest uncurled by a degree. “You are very bad at this.”
“At what?”
“At conversation. At the kind of silly diversion that fills time and passes pleasantly without arriving anywhere in particular. Drawing-room conversation.”
“I have not spent a great deal of time in drawing rooms.”
“No? I would have guessed otherwise, from the accent. You do a creditable job of convincing yourself you sound like a local, but you cannot quite conceal the posh beneath it.”
He said nothing. The wind found the opening of the cleft and sent a thin blade of cold across his exposed side—the side she did not occupy—and he turned his shoulder to block it.
“I went to sea at eighteen,” he said. “Before that, I was at school, where the conversation was conducted largely through insult and competition. I have never acquired the habit of speaking for the sake of speaking. I say what is necessary and am silent when it is not.”
“That must make you very popular at suppers.”
“I do not attend suppers.”
“No. You attend a lighthouse. Where the only conversation is with a mechanism that will not answer and a steward who will not stop asking questions.”
He looked down at her again. Her face was still turned against his chest, but the corner of her mouth was visible, and it held the ghost of something—not quite the smile she had produced at the sight of his sister’s handwriting, but something adjacent.
A warmth she was permitting herself because the alternative was the cold and the dark and the memory of the water closing over her head.
“You are… your constant questions are not entirely odious,” he allowed.
He could not mistake it this time. Her mouth tugged into a decided smirk. “Well spoken—the words of a true gentleman, I daresay. Now, it is your turn.”
“My turn?”
“To fill the silence. I have offered you gulls and clouds and an observation about your conversational deficiencies. You must contribute something, or the exchange becomes a monologue. I have four sisters, and I can tell you from long experience that no one enjoys a monologue except the person delivering it.”
“Four sisters?”
She winced. “Three now. Jane was the eldest. Then me. Then Mary, who reads sermons for pleasure. Then Kitty, who reads novels for pleasure. Then Lydia, who reads nothing for pleasure but is the loudest person in any room she enters, and I love her dearly and would cheerfully lock her in a cupboard.”
He came perilously close to a grunt of… not amusement.
The family assembled itself in his mind—not as names but as an architecture of relationships, a household of women governed by the second eldest, who just now sat in a cleft in a rock on a Northumberland coast with her lungs still clearing seawater and made jokes about cupboards, because if she stopped joking she would have to feel what had happened, and she was not ready to feel it.
“You are the one who manages them all,” he said.
She stiffened only slightly, and her brow creased.
“I was... before I came to Northumberland.” The confirmation carried no pride.
“Papa managed before me. But Papa—Papa had a way of managing that involved sitting in his library and trusting the world to conduct itself without his intervention, and the world obliged him right up until the point where it did not.” Her jaw tightened. “He died two years ago. His heart.”
His arms tightened. It was an accident. “I am sorry.”
“He would have liked you, I think. He admired people who were difficult to talk to. He said the easy ones were never worth the effort.”
“I am trying to decide whether you meant to frame that as a compliment.”
The water lapped below. A gull called from somewhere beyond the opening of the cleft—sharp, plaintive, unanswered.
“One,” she said.
“What?”
“One gull. I heard one. You may begin your count.”
He let out a breath that was not a laugh.
It was the nearest thing to one he had produced in five years, and it surprised him so thoroughly that for an instant, the cold and the rock and the sea fell away and there was only the absurdity of a woman counting gulls against his chest while the tide decided whether to kill them.
“Tell me about your sisters.”
The question surprised her. Her body stilled its shivers against him—a half-second of suspended breath, as though she had expected him to retreat into silence and was adjusting to the fact that he had not.
“What would you like to know?”
“Whatever you would like to tell me. Talking keeps you from shaking so hard and only requires me to listen.”
“Jane sings. She does not think she sings well, but she does. Mary plays better, technically, but Jane’s voice—”
She stopped. The present tense. She had used it, and the word hung in the air of the cleft, and she did not correct it. She glanced up at him—just the ridge of her lashes appearing from under her brows as she peeked. Her ribs expanded in a slightly deeper breath, and she forged on.
“Well, Jane’s voice does what Mary’s fingers cannot. It makes you listen without knowing you are listening.”
“And Kitty?”
“Kitty draws. She will not show anyone. She keeps a book beneath her mattress, and I found it once—not snooping, I was changing the linens, which is not the same thing—and the drawings were extraordinary. Faces, mostly. People in the village. She sees people the way—”
She stopped again. He waited.
“The way I read them. From the outside. But she puts it on paper, and I only put it in my head, and the difference is that hers can be shared and mine cannot, and I have always envied her that.”
“And what of Lydia?”
“Lydia is fifteen and believes herself immortal and finds the entire world insufficiently entertaining and is so thoroughly, exasperatingly alive that being in a room with her is like standing beside a bonfire. You cannot look away and you cannot get close without being singed.” The affection in her voice was fierce and unguarded, and he heard it the way he heard the change in the wind—a shift in register that told him something fundamental about the weather. “I worry about Lydia most.”
“Because she is the youngest?”
“Because she does not understand that the world does not forgive young women for being exasperating. She stayed in Hertfordshire with Mama after... Well, when the rest of us went to London. Fewer people looking over her shoulder there, you see. Young men are permitted to be wild. Young ladies are permitted to be nothing.”
The observation echoed in the cleft, and he did not argue with it because he could not. He had seen enough of the world to know she was right, and the knowledge sat beside his own failures with a weight he could not pretend did not belong to him.
Time passed. He could mark it by the water—the tide reaching its highest point against the rocks below, holding, trembling at the edge of its ambition before beginning the long, slow retreat.
Her shivering had eased to an occasional tremor.
His had not—the side of him exposed to the air had gone numb from shoulder to hip, and the cold had settled into his hands with a permanence that would take hours beside a fire to reverse.
She was warmer than she had been. He was colder. The exchange was working as intended, even if the benefit had been hers and the cost was his.
“Your turn,” she said. “Tell me something. Not the… nothing serious. Something small. Something ordinary.”
He thought about this. The request was simple, and the simplicity was the difficulty—he had spent five years reducing himself to the work, stripping away everything that was not the tower and the flame, until the ordinary had become foreign and the personal had become dangerous.
“I like dogs.”