Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Inside were a new pair of gloves. Kid leather, lined with wool, the colour of chestnuts.
A bonnet—dark green, trimmed with ribbon, more fashionable than anything the coast required but chosen with the particular care her aunt gave to every gift, as though beauty were a form of sustenance and ought to be provided regardless of circumstances.
There was also a letter from her uncle in which he asked after the light and the accounts and mentioned, in passing, that Kitty had taken up watercolours, Mary was thriving under the tutelage of her new piano master, and that the house was quieter without her.
There was a letter from her aunt in which she asked after Elizabeth’s health and her spirits, and enclosed a cutting from a London paper about the Northumberland coast that she had thought Elizabeth might find interesting.
No letter from her mother. No letter from Lydia. The absence sat inside the parcel like an object she had chosen not to unwrap.
She wore the gloves to the tower that afternoon.
He saw them—she was certain he saw them, because his gaze dropped to her hands when she set the basket on the table and the leather caught the firelight—but he said nothing about them, the way he said nothing about the hair, the way he said nothing about anything that acknowledged she was a woman and not merely a steward who checked oil levels and tended wicks and argued with trustees on his behalf.
She wondered, as she climbed the stair to the gallery that evening, whether anyone would send him anything for Christmas.
The cream paper had not appeared on the table for a fortnight.
The quarterly letter—the one in the even, business-like hand—would be due soon.
If his sister had replied again, the letter had not come, or it had come, and he had concealed it more successfully than the first pair.
She could not ask. She could not ask because asking would mean acknowledging that she had catalogued the frequency of his correspondence, which would mean acknowledging that she paid attention to his private life with an attentiveness she could not justify, which would mean acknowledging something she had acknowledged in the gallery three weeks ago with her hand on his neck and her mouth on his, and which she had been systematically refusing to acknowledge since.
The wick needed trimming. She knelt at the housing and trimmed it, and the flame steadied, and the beam turned, and below her the headland lay in darkness and above her the glass carried its light, and she was the steward of both.
He went down to the village on a Thursday for oil.
The harbour was busy in the way harbours are busy in mid winter—the boats coming in earlier, the catches smaller, the men working faster against the shortened light.
He collected the oil from Hurst and loaded the tins onto the handcart he had borrowed, and he was at the harbour wall adjusting the rope when Tom Calder and Jem Docket found him.
“Wickie.” Tom leaned against the wall with the ease of a man whose chief occupation was finding surfaces to lean against. “Haven’t seen you in a fortnight. Been busy up there?”
“The mechanism requires daily attention.”
“The mechanism.” Tom shared a glance with Jem that communicated a volume’s worth of meaning. “And how is the ‘mechanism’?”
“Functioning.”
“Good. Glad to hear it. Only we noticed you don’t come down so often now. No pyre to build. Light’s burning. Steward’s managing the accounts and the inspectors and the correspondence and whatever else it is stewards do. Which leaves you with—what, exactly?”
“The light. The maintenance. The watch.”
“Right. The watch.” Tom pushed off the wall. “It’s only—if a man finds himself with time he didn’t have before, a man might consider putting that time to use. Socially, I mean.”
“I am not a social man.”
“No, you’re not. Which is a waste, frankly, because you’ve got a woman up there who’s cleverer than any of us, braver than most of us, and better looking than all of us, and you’re… what? Polishing brass?”
“The brass requires polishing to keep corrosion at bay.”
Jem laughed. Tom did not. Tom looked at him with an expression that held genuine exasperation beneath the amusement, the expression of a man who could not fathom how another man could occupy the same headland as Elizabeth Bennet and fail to act upon the obvious.
“All I’m saying,” Tom said, “is that if you’re not interested, there’s others who’d be willing to make the climb. Just so you know.”
“No one is climbing the headland to importune the steward.”
“Importune?” Tom tasted the word. “There’s a five-shilling word for a man who polishes brass.”
“Leave him,” Jem said, grinning. “He’ll work it out. Or he won’t, and one of us will.”
They departed with the loose, unhurried gait of men who had delivered their message and were satisfied with the discomfort it had produced.
He stood at the harbour wall with the handcart and the oil and the thin December wind coming off the water.
The discomfort sat where they had placed it, and he could not dislodge it, and the climb back to the tower was longer than it should have been.
His sister’s second letter arrived on the same day as her first reply.
Two envelopes in Shaw’s sack—the first dated two weeks after his letter, the second dated a week after that.
She had written twice before he could have received either.
The implication was plain: she had not waited for his answer.
She had written because she could not stop herself from writing, and the frequency was its own kind of reproach.
He read them in the gallery, by the light of the flame. The first was shorter than the Bath letter—calmer, more contained, as though the act of writing to him regularly had given her a structure she could inhabit without the desperation that had driven the earlier correspondence.
Dearest Brother,
Your letter arrived this morning. I read it four times. I read it to my aunt, who cried, and to my uncle, who did not cry but went very quiet, which is his version of the same thing.
We are back in London. My aunt has taken me to the theatre twice this week, which I believe is her method of preventing me from spending every evening at the instrument.
She is probably right. The second performance was a comedy, and I laughed — actually laughed — which surprised me and surprised my aunt and did not surprise my uncle, who says I have always laughed when I am not trying not to.
You mentioned Bella. I was glad. She is well — old and deaf and still sleeping in every doorway, and she misses you in the way dogs miss people, which is to say completely and without the complications we attach to the feeling.
Richard dined with us on Tuesday. He asks after you every time we meet, which is more often than you might expect.
I think my aunt has instructed him to keep watch over me, and he has taken to the assignment with more good humour than it probably deserves.
I know you and he were never easy with one another in the way cousins are supposed to be.
Perhaps because you only have a few unhappy recollections of him from school, but he is better company than you would credit, and he speaks of you with a warmth I do not think he manufactures.
He would write to you himself, but he says you would not answer him, and I could not argue the point with any conviction.
You said you are keeping a light. You said the work suits you.
You did not say you are happy, and I did not expect you to, because you have never used that word about yourself even when it applied.
But your letter was longer than three lines, and the handwriting was steadier than the last one, and I choose to read both of those things as evidence.
Your sister, G.
The second was shorter.
Dearest Brother,
Mrs. Reynolds writes that the south roof is leaking again.
I mention this not because I expect you to do anything about it, but because someone ought to tell you, and I find I have appointed myself to the post. The housekeeper should not have to write to a man in Northumberland about roof tiles. The sister may.
I have also taken it upon myself to instruct the gardener about the east border, which had gone to seed in a manner I believe you would find personally offensive. My aunt says I am becoming managing. I prefer to think of it as filling a vacancy.
We have been dining with the Ashfords — Colonel Ashford served with Richard, and his wife is kind without being exhausting, which is a quality I have come to value above almost all others in London society.
Their daughter Charlotte is near my age and reads more than she speaks, which suits me very well.
I think you would like the Colonel. He is quiet in the way you are quiet, which is to say he is listening when other people believe he is not.
I mention this for no particular reason and with no particular hope.
I do not know if you will read this. I write it anyway.
G.
He folded both letters and held them. The flame turned above him. Beyond the glass the sea moved in its patient, indifferent rhythm, and somewhere in London his sister was reading his words for the fourth time and choosing to find hope in the length of his sentences and the steadiness of his hand.
He had not sent her anything for Christmas.
The thought arrived with the cruelty of truths that had been ignored until ignoring them was no longer possible.
He had not sent anything because he had not thought of it, and he had not thought of it because thinking of Christmas required thinking of the life he had left.
And the life he had left contained a drawing room and a pianoforte and a sister who played in the evening while the fire burned and the dog slept in the doorway and the warmth of the house gathered its people the way the flame gathered the dark.
He would send something. Not a gift—a gift required a knowledge of her current wants that he did not possess, and the gap between what she was at eleven and what she was at sixteen was a gap he had created by leaving and could not bridge by post.
He would send a letter. A long one. He would tell her about the coast and the reef and the mechanism and the village and the steward who counted gulls.
He would not tell her about the gallery or the cleft or the blue gown, because those things were his and he was not ready to share them.