Lighthouse Bay (16 page)

Everyone? She tried to imagine what Juliet would think.

“I can tell by that expression that you’re still not going to sell.”

“Thanks so much for taking the time to show me all this,” she said. “But perhaps you should look elsewhere.”

“Lighthouse Bay is perfect for it. It’s going to be the next to develop. It has to be.” Then he put his hands up, a defeated gesture. “I understand. Will you at least let me put some sums together and e-mail you an offer?”

Again, Libby was curious. But a little current of fear ran through her. With the money problems she was facing, it could be too tempting.

“Please?” he said.

She looked at him. He had such a genuine smile. “It can’t hurt. But please do brace yourself for disappointment.”

“Of course. Once you’ve refused a formal offer, I’ll leave you be. I’ll still get my gold star for meeting with you. That’s something my boss has been trying to achieve for years.”

She smiled back. “Thank you for lunch.”

“The pleasure was all mine.” He caught her in his gaze a moment, then looked away almost shyly and, inexplicably, Libby’s heart lurched. “I have a three o’clock meeting. I’d best get you home.”

T
hat evening, she checked her e-mail and the offer was waiting, attached to a message from somebody named Yann Fraser. Tristan’s name wasn’t anywhere in evidence. Libby felt strangely let down. Then she opened the file and her heart stopped.

They were offering her two and a half million dollars.

1901

M
atthew gravitates towards the woman, again and again. He works the lamp, he times the signal, he cranks the weights, he listens to the mechanism make its familiar clunking noise as it turns the prism that sends the pattern of light out across the sea. In the telegraph room, he writes in his journal by the light of the lamp and he fills out the forms the government and the shipping companies require. But in between these tasks he returns to the side of the bed and looks down on her, and a sadness stirs inside him. No, she is not Clara, but she is so very like her. The fair hair, the soft bow of her mouth. But more than that. The wildness in her eyes, the sense that she is somehow a trapped bird who requires kindness and the gentlest handling, and eventually—inevitably—release.

A trapped bird, but a very pretty bird.

But perhaps he is a fool. Twenty years alone can bend a man, even if the isolation is chosen by him rather than thrust upon him. He knows nothing about this woman. Where has she come from, barefoot and bleeding? How far has she traveled? From one of the inland gold-mining towns? Then why not simply take the train to Brisbane? Why is she here, and what has she left behind?

The long wooden chest—and the way she leaped on it like a wildcat defending her young—makes him curious too.

Matthew pulls up a stool a few feet from the bed and watches her in the flickering lamplight. She looks peaceful now, her chest rising and falling softly. Tomorrow he will have to coax her out of the lighthouse before anyone knows she was here. He rises and goes to the window, looks out at the sea. The light from the big prism above him flashes out across the waves, running from north to south, then going dark again, but the sea is quiet tonight. No ships, no storms, no high winds. Light, then dark, light, then dark, the familiar pattern in which he has found comfort these many years at Lighthouse Bay. But even though the light still runs to its rhythm, he can feel that his own has been disrupted. And he both longs for his familiar loneliness and dreads it in equal measure.

I
sabella wakes in the gray before dawn. The room is filled with the aromatic punch of tobacco smoke. Matthew stands by the narrow window. He puffs on his pipe and it illuminates his face momentarily. She blinks rapidly, adjusting her eyes to the dark. There is something peaceful about his countenance. Matthew means her no harm. He is her beacon in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I left you nowhere to sleep.”

He turns. “I don’t sleep at night. I sleep during the afternoon,” he said. “I’m very busy at night.”

The horrors of her recent past come back to her, but a good night’s sleep in a warm bed has taken the edge off their cruelty. The future hasn’t come yet, the past is behind her. Just now, she is safe.

He withdraws his pipe from his mouth and taps the ashes out into a clay saucer on the table. “Sleep a little longer, Mary,” he says.

“My name isn’t Mary,” she replies, though she doesn’t know
why. It is as though she cannot stand Matthew to be fooled in such a way. “My name is Isabella.”

“I see.”

“Please don’t ask me to tell you anything else.”

He presses his lips together, and it makes his face look grim in the dark. Then he says, gently, “And so I shall not. Not of your past. What I do need to know, so I can help you, is what you intend next.”

What does she intend next? Just a week or so ago she had been so sure: escape her husband, sell her jewelry, find her sister in New York. Now she has already escaped her husband. Back in England there is a house for her, wealth, a life of ease, but those things would come at a high price: continuing attachment to his family. Old Mrs. Winterbourne would be there at every opportunity, looking for a way to make Isabella’s life a misery. Percy . . . Well, what wouldn’t he do? Given how he had treated her when his brother was still alive.

“I’m running away,” she says. “I’m running away to America to find my sister.” And as she says it, she is filled once again with purpose. “I have escaped a loveless marriage. I lost an infant, and my husband sought to punish me for my grief. I am running away to New York, where I can find some comfort, and be of some use to my sister Victoria, who is expecting a child of her own. And I will be free to feel . . .” Isabella realizes she is sitting up, fists clenched on the blankets in front of her. Her voice has become shrill. “I will be free to feel whatever is in my heart,” she finishes in a whisper.

She glances up at Matthew’s face. The darkness in the room is dissolving. She sees the softness in his eyes. He moves to the side of the bed and kneels next to it. He takes her hand: her fingers in his, his other hand encircled around her wrist. “Isabella, I am so sorry for your loss. What name did your child go by?”

“Daniel. His name was Daniel.”

“I am so sorry you lost Daniel. That is a great sorrow for anyone to bear, but especially a mother. Your heart must be heavier than the ocean.”

A fist of grief pushes its way up Isabella’s throat. Nobody has ever said this to her before. She has been told that Daniel is smiling at her from heaven, that she will have another child to replace him, that if she works very hard the sun will shine again, that if she doesn’t get over her sadness she will lose friends and vex her family. But nobody, in almost three years, has simply said, “I am so sorry you lost Daniel.” Most of the time, other people won’t even use his name, though she doesn’t know why. As though one mustn’t say the name of a dead child because it will make matters worse. Fifteen days alive is hardly alive at all. Better to lose him before he became a real human being, with a name and a personality. She knows they think it. She knows they think she is nursing her loss self-indulgently or refusing to get better.

Matthew doesn’t think that.

He stands and moves away, and she feels the warm after-impression of his touch on her skin. He comes to rest at the window again, looking out over the sea. The waves roll and crash, but today the sound is soothing. Faraway chaos, while she is safe and still. It occurs to her for the first time since the wreck that she is back on solid ground.

“I need to bathe, Matthew,” she says.

He nods. “Of course.” He shows her where the bath is, and fetches her a pale yellow gown and a pair of brown shoes; she can see immediately that the latter will be too small. When she is clean and dressed, he is nowhere to be seen. She cautiously surveys his cottage. The main room, the tiny bedroom, and another room
full of wires and metal objects and reels and other unrecognizable equipment.

“The lighthouse is also the telegraph station,” he explains, making her jump.

“I didn’t know you were there,” she says.

“I was upstairs, extinguishing the light. My shift is finished now.”

“Do you operate the telegraph? Or does somebody else work here?”

“No, only me. Lighthouse Bay doesn’t have a post office. I receive and send telegrams for the town here.”

“Lighthouse Bay? Is that where I am?”

“You are.”

“Am I near Sydney?”

He shakes his head. “No, but a little farther south there’s a port that might be able to take you there. Certainly, if you want to go to New York, you have to get yourself to Sydney first,” he says in a practical tone.

“It will cost money for a trip to America,” she says, thinking of her jewelry, lying at the bottom of the ocean. “I have nothing of value I can sell.” Trying to sell the mace would be like setting a dazzling beacon for the Winterbournes to locate her.

“Mrs. Fullbright was lately expecting a new nanny for her child, a little boy named Xavier. I took the telegram to her just a week ago: the young woman engaged for the position decided not to come. There is honest work there for you, I’m sure, if you’re willing to ask for it.”

Mrs. Fullbright again. Matthew was determined she should go to town, and now, after a night of sleep has restored her senses, she understands that he is right. She cannot wait here at the lighthouse for things to change on their own. She must make a move even
if it means working as a servant to a woman who probably isn’t as wealthy as she is. There, in the chest, is an object of such immense value that it could buy Mrs. Fullbright several times over. Gold. Gems. Then she thinks of Daniel’s bracelet on its modest black ribbon, buried in the bottom of the chest, and she is seized with the sudden knowledge that everything bad happened
after
she took it off.

The argument with Arthur that saw her confined below deck, unable to say her prayer to the sea.

The unrelenting stormy weather.

The shipwreck. The struggle to survive. The injuries.

The bad luck wouldn’t stop until she had that bracelet back on her wrist. “I need you to help me open the chest,” she says, her voice shaking.

“Do you not have a key?”

“No.” She is already on her way to the main room, where the chest is still by the door.

He frowns as he crouches next to her, in front of the chest. “Is this . . . ?”

“Stolen? No. Not . . . not really stolen.” A creeping fear. Now Matthew’s kindness will run out, the last few grains of sand through an hourglass.

A moment of uncertainty. Then he nods. “I said I would ask no further questions and I will keep to my word.”

“Thank you.”

“Come,” he says. “I keep the small axe up on the deck.”

He hefts the chest and starts up the stairs. Isabella hesitates on the first step, gazing up at the nautilus swirl of the staircase. But Matthew is clattering ahead of her, and she makes her way up and up, past long dangling chains, through a hatch and up into the top of the lighthouse. An immense lamp, surrounded by a box
of prismatic lenses, golden and glass concentric circles, takes up most of the space. There is an oily smell, not unpleasant. Matthew opens a small door and fresh morning air pours in. Then she is stepping out onto a round deck, high above the world, with a view for miles and miles to the distant dark horizon. The deck is peppered with dead moths and beetles, and one dead seagull. Matthew scoops it over the edge with his toe and drops the chest to the metal floor with a clang.

He opens a wooden box, full of tools, and pulls out a small axe.

“I will try to do this without doing too much damage to the chest,” he says.

“I don’t care. I will be ridding myself of the chest and most of its contents as soon as I can. It is a burden I wish never to see again.” Her heart is beating fast, so fast it makes her head feel light.

Matthew raises the axe, takes aim and then brings it down on the first lock. Wood splinters, the lock clatters to the ground. Then another, and another blow. Five in all, one for each of the wretched locks. Then he stands, moves back and makes a show of turning away. “I’m better off not knowing what is in there,” he says.

Isabella can’t breathe, she is so grateful. She quickly flips open the lid. High sunlight dazzles off the gold and gems. Her hands are already moving underneath it, lifting the velvet, finding the ribbon.

She withdraws it and lets the lid fall closed. Her thumbs move over the coral beads on the bracelet, and a strange calm settles on her nerves, untangles the knots in her brain. All is simple: she will work for Mrs. Fullbright for as long as it takes to earn her passage to America. With Daniel’s bracelet around her wrist, she can endure anything.

“You can turn around now,” she says.

He turns. She holds out her wrist. “Will you help me tie this on?”

“Of course.” He gently and quickly ties the ribbon around her wrist.

“This is the last memory I have of Daniel,” she says softly, and her voice is nearly carried away on the wind and the sunshine. She looks at the chest. “And I should get this far away from me. Somewhere nobody can ever find it.” Her eyes go to the sea. That’s where it belongs: at the bottom of the ocean.

Matthew follows her gaze. “I can row it out a little way and drop it in the water.”

“Is it deep?”

“I’ll take it out as far as I can, while the ocean is still relatively calm.”

She nods. “Do it.”

They take the chest back inside, wrap it in Isabella’s torn, bloodstained dress, and then Matthew leaves to take it out to sea, away from her. She clatters back up the stairs and out on the deck to watch her last link to the Winterbournes severed forever.

M
atthew tells himself over and over that he won’t look. He won’t look. He doesn’t need to know what is in the chest. And yet . . . here she is, asking him to dump it at sea. She is tired, confused, crushed by a grief that has clearly bent her mind. What if she regrets it? What if she regrets sending the contents of this chest to the bottom of the ocean? He remembers the time Clara charged him with burning a letter from her mother before she had read it. He did as she asked, only to be berated tearfully later.