Chapter 22 #2
She wrote to the trustees’ solicitor, confirming the apparatus was operational and requesting an update on Mr Norwood’s schedule.
She wrote to the Seahouses harbourmaster—a second inquiry, more specific than the first, asking about the boat that had pulled something from the Farne Channel.
She wrote to Mary and Kitty, and the letters were thicker than the ones she had sent a fortnight ago, because the light was burning and the coast was safer and she could describe the gallery at night without describing the darkness.
She did not write to her mother. How could she know what to say that would not be either a lie or an injury? The space between those two options was too narrow to navigate with a pen.
He wrote to his sister. She knew this because he wrote in the evenings now rather than retreating to the gallery with the letters hidden inside his coat, and the cream paper he used was the same cream paper she had glimpsed that first day—the paper with the woman’s hand, the claret seal.
He wrote slowly, stopping between sentences with a look on his face that could almost be described as pained.
The silences were longer than the sentences, and the pen moved with none of the fluency she brought to her own correspondence.
He was writing to someone to whom he had not spoken honestly in a long time, and the effort of it was visible in the set of his shoulders and the care with which he chose each word.
She did not ask what he wrote. She did not look at the pages. But she was aware of him writing in the way she was aware of the tide—a constant, peripheral knowledge that required no attention and received it, anyway.
On the fifth evening, he sealed the letter—the sixth or seventh draft of it, if her counts were at all accurate—and set it aside. He said, without looking up, “I have written to my sister.”
“Good.”
“I asked her about the dog.”
She looked at him. The corner of his mouth held something that was not quite a smile—a small, private movement that she had seen only once before, in the cleft, when she had made him almost laugh by counting gulls.
It vanished before it could be catalogued, but the warmth of it stayed in the room the way lamplight stays in a room after the door has closed.
“Bella,” she said.
“Bella.”
“You told her you miss the deaf spaniel?”
“I told her several things. The spaniel was the easiest.”
She looked at him longer than was safe and then returned to her own letter, and the inkwell sat between them, and the fire burned low, and above them the lantern turned in its steady arc, and the distance between the settle and the stair had never been shorter or more carefully preserved.
The cottage was nearly finished.
They worked it in the last of the daylight now, before her evening descent to the village—an hour, sometimes two, while the sun dropped toward the western horizon and the headland turned gold and then grey.
The chimney drew. Not well, not cleanly, but it drew.
His masonry was rough but sound, and the fire she lit in the grate each afternoon—testing the draft, seasoning the stone—filled the cottage with a warmth that smelled of lime and woodsmoke and the damp that would take weeks to fully leave the walls.
Robson had been engaged for the roof—she had told him only that the seam had worsened and needed boarding from outside, which was true, and which did not require him to enter the cottage and see the interior repairs that a keeper’s wage should not have funded.
Robson accepted the commission without questions that could not be answered.
The village had learned that the steward conducted her business on her own terms, and the terms, however unusual, were producing results.
The trunk she had moved to the corner and opened.
Two gowns were actually salvageable—stiff with salt, discoloured, but wearable if one did not examine the fabric too closely.
The books had been set once more upon the mantel, including the four she had rescued from the storm.
The settle had been positioned before the fire.
A basin, a jug, and a mirror borrowed from the tower completed the arrangement, and the room, when she stood in its doorway and regarded it with the assessor’s eye she had been cultivating, looked like what it needed to look like: a small, austere, habitable dwelling occupied by a woman of modest means and serious purpose.
It did not look like a home. But it looked like hers, and on this coast, the distinction was less important than the fact.
Mr Norwood was expected in four days. The cottage would hold. The tower would hold. The lantern would hold, provided she and the keeper continued to tend it as they had been tending it—together, carefully, with the disciplined proximity that kept the flame steady and the truth at bay.
She stood in the cottage doorway and looked across the headland to the tower. The afternoon light caught the gallery glass, and behind it the faint warmth of the flame—invisible in full sun but present, always present, a heat she could not see but knew was there.
Four days. She closed the cottage door and went to the tower to prepare.