Lighthouse Bay (17 page)

So he must look. He must be the rational brain that she cannot be. If he looks, and it is a collection of old books, or clothes, or bottles, or clocks or . . . anything worthless and random, then he will dispose of it. But if it is something that signifies, something
that she may later wish she had kept, then he will preserve it for her secretly.

The door to the lighthouse closes behind him. He rounds the corner of the cottage and finds the tin cabinet that keeps his woodpile dry. In the shadow of the cabinet, he unwraps the chest and, quickly so he can’t change his mind, flips it open.

“Oh, my. My, my, my,” he mutters. For in the chest is a thing of such beauty and value that he cannot comprehend at first. Its gleaming stem, its ornate head, carved gold. Jewels: red, green, blue. He doesn’t know what the object is, but it is not something worthless and random. And he knows he cannot let her dispose of it. She will regret it. He is certain.

He pulls a log from the woodpile—about the same length as the chest—then wraps it in the dress. Then closes the chest and hides it carefully among the woodpile. He makes his way down the narrow path to the sheltered side of the rock wall, and down the mossy stairs to the rowboat. He glances up. Isabella is watching from the deck. He waves to her, and she waves back, the black ribbon around her wrist. A moment’s guilt, then he is rowing against the waves. This task would be impossible in the afternoon, when the wind is fresh and the sea wild, but mornings are often calm. He rows as far out as he can before the rip catches him. The sun is on his forearms. He makes a show of hefting the log and plunging it into the water. She will be watching. Will she already be regretting? It matters not. If she changes her mind, he will have it somewhere safe for her.

Whatever it is.

M
atthew insists she takes the day to rest before heading to Mrs. Fullbright’s. Her wounds are still healing and her feet are still
sore. She spends the morning in bed, then when Matthew needs to sleep at noon she sits up on the deck watching the ocean and letting her mind drift. She is apprehensive about approaching Mrs. Fullbright, and still doesn’t know if she will be welcomed. But Matthew seems confident, and she trusts Matthew. She trusts him even though she doesn’t know him. There is something familiar about him, something comforting in his presence that awakes a primitive feeling in her, a long-buried sense of safety. She is loath to leave him, but understands she must. She knows how society works: a young woman cannot stay with a single man in a house with one bed. She needs to do what society dictates if she wants the job with Mrs. Fullbright, if she wants to earn honest money and find her way to her sister.

The afternoon deepens. It will soon be dusk, and Matthew will be awake, ready to work. She takes a few last breaths up here on the deck, above the world, then returns down the deep spiral staircase and into the cottage.

Matthew is up, in his trousers and undershirt and braces, lighting his pipe. He turns as she enters the room, smiles with only one corner of his mouth.

“I suppose I must go,” she says.

“It’s for the best. You will find your way.”

She nods and moves to the door to pull on the shoes that are too tight. Matthew has packed for her a small bag: two more dresses, both too large for her. But at least she has clothes. Her heart is beating in her throat, she feels helpless.

“I am here if you need me, Isabella,” he says, then smiles and corrects himself, “I mean, Mary Harrow.”

“Thank you,” she says. “For everything.”

Then the door closes quietly behind her and she stands on the path that will lead her down to the town.

Despite her stinging feet, she moves with deliberate sure-footedness. The path is sandy, bracketed on both sides by thick, sharp-smelling vegetation. She recognizes the edible berries, but she doesn’t need to pick them. She has eaten three solid meals today, and Mrs. Fullbright will have more for her. The path opens up, and the town comes into view. On the other side of the forest verge that protects them from the ocean winds sit wooden buildings with tin roofs. There are, perhaps, twenty houses. A pub. A large shed that might be to do with the sugar and timber trade Matthew has mentioned. A plain little church with plastered walls.

From the hill, she looks for the big house at the near end of the main street. Pale pink boards. Two stories high with a large verandah all the way around. It sits on a square of green grass, with tidy garden beds. This is where Mrs. Katherine Fullbright lives with her son, Xavier, and presumably a husband and other hired help. Before Isabella saw the house, she had been half-hoping that Mrs. Fullbright wouldn’t take her in. She could return to the safety of the lighthouse. But now she has seen the lawn and the flowers, she wants to be there. She wants to put her feet in grass. She wants to be in a real house with carpets and curtains. It has been months since she has known such ordinary comforts.

Isabella walks with purpose down the path and over the grassy shoulder of the dirt road, then through the gate and right up the steps to Mrs. Fullbright’s front door. The windowsills are painted white. There are lace curtains. She likes Mrs. Fullbright already.

Isabella pulls her hair over the cut in her neck so she doesn’t alarm Mrs. Fullbright. Gloves borrowed from the former lighthouse keeper’s wife cover the scabs on her hands. She can do nothing about the sunburn, but she turns her face out of the full lamplight in any case.

She rings the brass bell and waits.

At length, the door opens a crack, and a dark-haired, sloe-eyed, full-lipped woman peers out.

“Hello,” Isabella says. “I am here to see Mrs. Fullbright.”

The door opens fully. “I am Katarina Fullbright,” says the woman with a slight accent that Isabella cannot place.

Isabella had thought a maid would answer the door, and is now trying to understand that this impossibly beautiful young woman, with smooth olive skin and slightly flared nostrils, is Mrs. Katherine Fullbright. She had been expecting a middle-aged Katherine, English of course, fussy about manners and laced into a conservative gown, not a crimson-clad Katarina.

She remembers her purpose, offers Katarina her hand. “I am Mary Harrow. I heard you require a nanny. I am a nanny and in need of employment.”

Katarina’s perfectly arched eyebrows shoot up. “You are?”

“I am. Though I have lost my references . . .”

“Do come in, Mary,” she says, unperturbed, leading Isabella into a sitting room with a high ceiling and wood-paneled walls. A large sofa with a crocheted throw on it sits next to two leather armchairs. Bookshelves and a sideboard cover one wall. Isabella can see through to a small dining room and beyond to a kitchen. The house is clean and smells like lemon-and-oil furniture polish. It is lit only by two fat candles. “Sit down. This is a welcome surprise,” Katarina says.

“Thank you,” Isabella says, perching on the sofa with her bag between her feet.

“I had thought I would have to advertise again, wait for months,” Katarina says. “It’s hard to find anybody willing to come so far and Xavier is . . . He is a difficult child. You don’t mind a difficult child?”

For the first time, Isabella fully realizes that she will have to work for this honest money she wants. Back in Somerset, her days were consumed with needlework, cutting and arranging flowers, organizing high teas, accompanying her husband to town. She has never worked in her life. “Of course I don’t mind,” she says, and she wonders at the distance between what she is saying and what she is feeling. She should have stayed a few more days at the lighthouse. She shouldn’t have decided so rashly to come here. She is not thinking straight, she can’t think straight. The feeling of helplessness is back, a dark sob in her brain.

“Xavier, he is not here now,” Katarina is saying. “He has gone away with Mr. Fullbright for a few days.”

“Do you want me to come back then?”

“No need. You are here now. There is nowhere to stay in town except the pub, and that’s not fit for women. Cook has finished for the night, so you have missed dinner. If you are hungry, there is bread and dripping in the kitchen.”

“I’m not hungry. I . . .” Isabella touches her own forehead. “I am terribly, terribly tired.”

Katarina smiles. “Ah, a long journey? I see you are sunburned from being on the cart. Down from the gold fields? Is that where your last job was?”

Isabella nods.

“Come, Mary, I’ll show you the bathroom and nursery. You will sleep in the same room as Xavier. You have an early night tonight, and tomorrow we will work out details, yes?” Isabella has the impression that Katarina is itching to be away. Perhaps that explains the glorious gown.

Isabella nods, and Katarina leads her down a carpeted hallway: rooms lead off left and right. At the final set of doorways she
stops, indicates right, “Bathroom,” then left, “Nursery. There are sheets in the large chest at the end of the bed. I am going out this evening, you must forgive me.”

Then she is off in a whirl of red fabric and dark hair. Isabella goes to the bathroom. In the half-light, she can barely see her face in the mirror, but what she does see alarms her. She is, indeed, sunburned: glowing, with blisters on her nose. Her face is hollow, the shadows beneath her eyes dark and long. Her hair is lank and unbrushed. Compared to Katarina’s fresh beauty, Isabella is a hag. She has seen too many horrors and it shows on her face. She looks away. She splashes water on her face and washes her hands, then heads to the nursery.

Lanterns sit in brackets on either side of the doorway, so she lights them with the box of long matches that sits on the dresser. There is a cot pushed against a wall, and a small bed. Against the other wall is an adult-sized bed. Between the beds is a large blue rug and a box of toys. Isabella picks up a dropped teddy bear and places it on the small bed. She hasn’t even asked how old Xavier is. Again the feeling overwhelms her: what is she doing here? It’s too fast. She needs time to get used to the fact that they are all dead and she is on her own in a foreign place.

But last night she felt overwhelmed too, and after a good sleep she recovered. Her ordeal has exhausted her, deep down to her soul. She drops her bag beside her bed and slides out of her dress.

The front door bangs shut. Footsteps recede down the stairs. She is alone in a strange house. Curiosity prickles. She opens the nursery door and listens out, hard. Nothing. She pads to the end of the hallway and tries the door through to the sitting room. It is locked.

Isabella bristles, even though she knows she hasn’t a right to. Katarina had met her for the first time less than an hour ago: of course she
isn’t going to have free rein to explore the house alone. She is hired help.

Isabella returns to her room and sinks down on her knees on the bed, with her elbows resting on the windowsill. She can see the top of the lighthouse above the trees. Its beam has flashed into life and is making a pattern out to sea, across the miles and the raging ocean that separate Isabella’s old life from this new, strange one. She watches it while the night deepens and the dark closes in.

I
t is 3 am and Matthew is burying a large object in the forest. It is not a body, but he would feel just as guilty if it were. He has cranked the weights so the signal will keep flashing, but he has never left the lighthouse during operation before. Leaving the light unattended briefly is not forbidden, of course, but it is flirting with risk, and Matthew does not like risk. Nor does he like the fact that he lied to Isabella about this precious object that he has sealed carefully in its walnut coffin with oilskin, in order to bury it here among the buttonwood trees.

He finishes digging and stands, with his hand on his back. He is not as young as he once was. Then, when the twinge of pain recedes, he drops the box in the hole three feet deep and begins to cover it with soil. As he works, he wonders why he is doing this. Why is he neglecting his duties, toiling in the darkest hour of the night, hiding something precious that was probably gained illegally, for a woman he has known barely twenty-four hours? Is he such an old fool that anybody who reminds him of Clara can crook his moral compass?

No. He is helping a person in need, that is all. She came to him, desperate and bleeding, without so much as a pair of shoes. Now she has the precious token of her lost baby, and she has a
place to stay and an honest job. Burying this chest is as good as dropping it in the ocean: it just allows her to change her mind, should she decide to go back to where she came from one day.

Matthew pats the soil so that it lies at the same height as the surrounding area. Finally, he arranges some deadfall on top of it, so it seems as though nobody was ever here, burying treasure. It is time to go back to the light.

P
ercy Winterbourne can’t read. Of course he has been taught. Of course he isn’t stupid. But when he looks at letters and numbers, they sometimes turn to hieroglyphs: twist themselves upside-down and backwards. With a little concentration and some clever tricks—covering some letters while deciphering others, looking at them with a pocket mirror, then again without—he can usually get by. But the best way to get by is never to sit at a desk, never to open a book or a ledger, and never to be in company in those moments when he is forced to read something.

And when Arthur finally returns from his journey, Percy will hand all this paperwork back to him and never look at it again.

He sits, at his brother’s big mahogany desk, under the window that looks out onto the chestnut wood. The catkins are all blooming, and wildflowers glow golden on the ground in the late-afternoon sunshine. How he would love to be out there, with his dogs, tramping or hunting or just whistling a merry tune. Not in here trying for the fourth time to make the numbers at the bottom of the column match the sum of the numbers at the ends of the rows. He swears that now the numbers are jumping between columns and rows just to spite him because he has cursed them so often today.

A knock at the door. Percy pushes the ledger under a pile of jewelry orders. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he is still struggling with March’s figures, given it is nearly May.