Page 152 of The Lantern Keeper's Promise

Holt was greyer than he had been twelve years ago, and slower on the hill, but his handshake was the same—firm, professional, the grip of a man who had done his work well and knew it. “Mr Darcy. Mrs Darcy.” He turned to the young man beside him. “This is Thomas Ashworth. Thirty-six years of age, twelve years’ service on the coast, three of them at Inner Farne. Trinity House referred him with their compliments.”

Ashworth was not what Elizabeth expected. He was tall, certainly, and broad in the way of men who had spent their working lives in wind, but there was a brightness in his face that did not belong to the weathered, taciturn type she had come to associate with coastal keepers. He had an easy, open expression, the kind that suggested he smiled readily and often, and his eyes—brown, warm, alert—moved across the headland and the tower and the cottage with the frank admiration of a man seeing a place he intended to love.

He shook Darcy’s hand with appropriate formality. He shook Elizabeth’s hand with the same. Then Holt said, “And this is Miss Jane Bennet, currently steward of the Blackscar trust, who oversees the property and the covenant on behalf of the family.”

Ashworth turned to Jane, and something happened to his face.

It was not dramatic. He did not stagger or stare or lose command of his faculties. He was a professional man meeting a professional woman in a professional capacity, and he behaved accordingly.

He took her offered hand, bowed his head, and said, “Miss Bennet, it is an honour.”

His voice was steady, and his manner was correct. The only thing that betrayed him was the half-second too long before he released her hand, and the effort—visible, valiant, not entirely successful—that it cost him to arrange his bright, open face into something that did not broadcast to every person on the headland that the ground beneath him had just given way.

Jane withdrew her hand. She inclined her head with the composed grace she had carried since girlhood, the grace that two years in the sea had not taken from her and twelve years on the coast had not diminished. “Welcome to Blackscar, Mr Ashworth. I trust you will find the tower well maintained.”

“I am sure I will, Miss Bennet.”

Elizabeth looked at Darcy. Darcy was already looking at her.

Neither of them said a word.

TheyshowedAshworththetower. The stair, the gallery, the apparatus. The Fresnel lens was a subject of discussion—Trinity House had begun installing them at other stations, and Elizabeth had received a letter from the commissioners inquiring whether Blackscar might accept one. The existing lens was no longer the original, but it was clouded at its edges, magnificent in its inefficiency.

Darcy had opinions about replacing it. Elizabeth had opinions about his opinions, and Jane would adopt Elizabeth’s opinions as her own. The matter was unresolved, which meant it would be resolved on Elizabeth’s terms within the month, which Darcy understood and Ashworth did not yet, but would.

Ashworth studied the apparatus with the care of a man assessing a new command. He tested the fittings. He examined the lens. Holt walked him through the oil and the wick and the trimming shears, and Ashworth listened with the focused attention of a keeper who intended to know his station as well as the man who had kept it before him.

Elizabeth lifted the logbook from the iron table. Two volumes now—the original, which held every entry from the tower’s first lighting to the night Holt took his post, and the second, which Holt had begun when the first was full. She set them both in Ashworth’s hands.

“The tower’s whole history is in these,” she said. “Every keeper who climbed this stair is recorded. Every night the flame burned, and every night it did not. Read them when you have time. They will teach you more about this place than we can.”

Ashworth took the books with a gravity that suited them. He held them the way Darcy had once held them—as though they weighed more than leather and paper, which they did.

Darcy reached into his coat and produced the tinderbox from the iron table—the old one, the one that had been on that table since before his first night in the gallery. He had cleaned it that morning, oiled the hinge, checked the flint. He held it out.

“For the evening light,” he said. “The apparatus is ready. The wick is trimmed. The oil is full. You have only to strike the flame.”

Ashworth took the tinderbox. “Thank you.”

“Take care of her,” Darcy said.

Ashworth, who was bright enough and present enough to hear what lived beneath the words, glanced toward the stairwell where Jane’s footsteps were even now descending, and nodded once.

Elizabeth took Darcy’s arm. They descended the stair together—past the landing where the draught changed, past the narrow third step, past the place where the wall was cool in summer and cold in winter and where her hand had rested ten thousand times on the way up and the way down. They stepped out into the July afternoon. The headland was gold with late sun. The children were on the beach below, their voices rising and falling with the waves. Jane had followed them out of the tower and now stood at the door, shading her eyes.

Elizabeth looked up at the gallery. The glass caught the western light and threw it back in colours she had never seen in her first winter—amber, rose, pale green.

“It is a fine old tower,” she said.

“It is.”

She leaned against his arm, and he covered her hand with his. Below them, the sea kept its appointment with the shore, and the gulls turned above the reef, and the coast stretched north and south in its long, certain line.

And at dusk, when Ashworth climbed the stair and struck the flint and set the flame, the light rose into the dark the way it had risen for two hundred years—steady, gold, and faithful—and swept the water, and the water answered, and the boats came in.