The mail coach dropped her at the edge of the cliff road, and the driver did not offer to go further. Nobody ever did. The gravel path wound upward through a corridor of wind-stunted spruce, each tree bent inward as though listening for something said long ago. Evangeline Marlowe gripped the handle of her traveling case and watched the coach retreat into the grey afternoon, its lanterns already winking on against the gathering dark.
She had not seen Cape Tempest since she was nine years old. The memory that returned to her now was of salt on her lips and her great-aunt Cordelia's hand, papery and precise, guiding her up these very stones. That had been twenty-one years past. Cordelia had written to her faithfully after that one visit, letters full of weather observations and botanical sketches and the occasional cutting remark about Evangeline's father. Then the letters had stopped, and Evangeline had not pursued the silence.
The will had arrived three weeks ago, delivered by a solicitor in Portland who smelled of pipe tobacco and seemed faintly relieved to be rid of the paperwork. Evangeline had stood in her father's kitchen in Devon with the envelope in her hand and read the words Wisteria Hollow and lighthouse and library until they blurred. She had not known her great-aunt had kept the old place. She had certainly not known that it would pass to her.
Wind met her at the top of the path, sharp and tasting of iron. Below, the Atlantic heaved against black rocks with a rhythm older than any name on any map. Above her, outlined against a sky the color of old pewter, rose the lighthouse of Cape Tempest. Its tower still stood, though the paint had weathered to the consistency of chalk. The lantern room at its crown was dark. She did not know if that was because the light had failed or because the light had been turned off long ago.
Beside the tower crouched the keeper's cottage, low-roofed and salt-blasted, its walls the same faded white as the tower's base. Wisteria vines climbed the eastern wall, bare now in October but knotted into thick cables that creaked softly in the gust. Beyond the cottage, half-hidden by a stand of hawthorn, sat a smaller stone building with a slate roof and a single shuttered window. That, she guessed, must be the library her great-aunt had always spoken of with such peculiar reverence.
No one came out to greet her. She had not expected anyone to.
The cottage door resisted her first attempt, swollen into its frame by years of coastal damp. She put her shoulder into it, and the hinges gave with a groan that sounded almost human. Inside, the air was colder than the air outside, and carried the dry, papery scent of a house closed up too long. She set her case down on the flagstone floor and let her eyes adjust.
The room she stood in was the keeper's parlor, if such a room could be called a parlor. A stone hearth occupied most of the north wall, its iron grate green with oxidation. A settle stood beside it, its cushion faded to the color of weak tea. Dried tallow candles sat in their iron holders along the mantel, untouched. A rocking chair faced the window, its seat still indented from the weight of the last person to sit in it.
Cordelia's rocking chair.
Evangeline crossed the room and ran her fingers along the chair's arm. The wood was smooth, worn to a dull sheen by the same hand, year after year, in this same window. She could picture it. She did not want to picture it.
A note lay on the table beneath the window, weighted down by a smooth grey stone. The paper was heavy, cream-colored, the ink faded to sepia. She recognized the handwriting before she recognized the words.
Miss Marlowe. If you have come, you will find the key in the third drawer of the desk in the study. The study is through the parlor and to your left. Do not lose the key. Do not speak of the library to anyone in the village until you have read what is inside. Read it in the order I have left for you. Begin with the blue notebook.
Your aunt, C. M.
Evangeline read the note twice. Then she folded it, once, precisely, and slipped it into the pocket of her coat. The third drawer. The study. The blue notebook. Her great-aunt had been dead for nearly four months, and still the woman was giving instructions.
She found the study without difficulty. The door stuck, as the front door had, but less severely. The room beyond was smaller than the parlor and smelled of linseed oil and old leather. A desk stood beneath a window that looked out toward the sea, its top scarred by decades of ink rings and compass marks. The third drawer slid open with a dry whisper, and there, resting on a square of black velvet, lay a key.
It was an old key, iron rather than brass, with a bow shaped into two interlocking circles. The bit was intricate, the wards cut in a pattern she did not recognize. It was not a modern key. It looked, in fact, very much like a key that might open a church door or a cell in some forgotten monastery.
She lifted it from the velvet and weighed it in her palm. It was heavier than it looked. She slipped it, too, into her coat pocket, where it sat beside the folded note like a second, colder secret.
The wind outside had risen. She could hear it now, pressing against the shuttered windows with the patience of something that intended to be heard. She moved through the cottage room by room, lighting the tallow candles one by one with matches she found in a tin on the kitchen shelf. The kitchen was small and functional, its pump dry, its stove cold. A pantry held a few tins of ship's biscuit and a cask of water that smelled faintly of oak. Upstairs, two bedrooms waited, their quilts turned back as though for an expected guest. Cordelia's room smelled of lavender and camphor. The other, smaller, smelled of nothing at all.
She chose the smaller room. She set her case on the bed, unpacked only what she needed for the night, and stood for a long moment at the window, looking out toward the stone building with the shuttered window.
The library.
Tomorrow, she told herself. She would read the note again in the morning, and she would begin with the blue notebook, and she would do things in the order her great-aunt had prescribed. Tonight, she would rest. She had been traveling for two days, and the wind at the cliffs was more than she was accustomed to, and the weight of the key in her pocket was beginning to feel less like an object and more like an expectation.
She ate two of the ship's biscuits, dry, and drank water from a jug she found in the kitchen cupboard. Then she returned to the parlor, drew the curtains against the dark, and sat in Cordelia's rocking chair. She did not mean to sit there. She meant only to look out at the view Cordelia had looked at for so many years. But the chair received her, and she let it, and for a long time she did not move.
The wind spoke against the glass. The sea spoke against the rocks. Somewhere out beyond the lantern room, a foghorn sounded, low and patient, marking the minutes until morning. Evangeline listened to the pattern of it, three long and two short, and thought of her mother, who had loved this coast and never returned to it. She thought of her father, who had spoken of Cordelia once and then never again. She thought of the key, and the blue notebook, and the locked library waiting in its quiet stone shell.
She did not sleep well that night. The bed was soft enough, but the wind found the gaps in the shutters and moved through the room like something searching. Once, near two in the morning by the clock on the mantel, she heard a sound from below that might have been a door, or might have been only the house settling into its bones.
She rose before dawn. The sky beyond the window was the color of a bruise, and the sea had gone still, as though holding its breath. She dressed in the clothes she had laid out the night before, and she went downstairs, and she opened the desk drawer, and she took out the key.
The library door was set into the eastern wall of the smaller stone building. It was iron-banded oak, black with age and salt, and it had no handle, only a keyhole shaped to receive the wards she had studied the night before. The wind had dropped, and the air was very quiet. She could hear her own breathing, and the soft tick of lichen dropping from the eaves above her, and far below, the long slow withdrawing of the sea.
She fitted the key into the lock. It resisted, then yielded, with a sound like a sigh drawn through a wooden pipe. The door swung inward on hinges that had not moved in months, and the smell that met her was the smell of her childhood summers: paper, and binding glue, and the faint sweetness of vellum left too long in one place.
She stepped inside. The room beyond was smaller than she had expected, and colder. A single tall window to the west let in the grey morning light, and beneath it stood a reading table of dark wood, its surface bare except for a stack of notebooks bound in cloth of varying colors. Blue, green, red, black. A fifth, bound in undyed linen, sat slightly apart from the others, as though it had been placed there last, or first.
She crossed to the table and rested her fingers on the blue notebook. The cloth was soft, almost velvety, and cool beneath her hand. She did not open it. Not yet.
She would begin, as her great-aunt had instructed, with the blue notebook, and she would read them in order, and she would not speak of the library to anyone in the village until she had done so. That was the bargain she had been offered, and she would keep it. For now.
She lifted the blue notebook from the stack, tucked it under her arm, and stepped back out into the morning. The wind had returned, gentler now, carrying the salt tang of the tide. Behind her, the library door closed of its own accord, the latch falling with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.
Evangeline Marlowe walked back toward the cottage, the blue notebook pressed against her ribs, and did not look back. She had a great deal of reading to do, and the day was young, and the key in her pocket was warm, now, from her hand.
The latch settled behind her with a finality that seemed to belong to someone else, some earlier keeper of that small and silent room. Evangeline paused on the path, one hand resting against the rough stone of the library wall, and let the wind push at her skirt. The notebook was heavier than she had expected, or perhaps her arm was simply unused to carrying anything besides the small leather purse she had brought from London, with its folded letters and her mother's tortoiseshell comb.
She turned her face toward the cottage, some thirty yards across the headland, its whitewash peeling in long ribbons. The chimney held no smoke. She had not thought to lay a fire before coming out, and the morning had been cool enough that the rooms would still carry last night's chill. She set her chin and began to walk.
Inside the cottage, the silence had a different quality. Not the held breath of the library, but something more ordinary, more patient, the silence of a place that had waited through many empty mornings and expected to wait through many more. She set the blue notebook on the deal table by the window and crouched to build up the kindling in the small iron grate. The first match flared, and she coaxed the shavings into a pale tongue of flame, then set a thin curl of birch bark across them. The bark caught with a soft crackle, and the smell of woodsmoke began to thread through the room.
She did not open the notebook. Not until the kettle had been filled and set on its hook above the fire, and the small iron teapot she had found in the cupboard had been rinsed and dried. Not until she had measured the tea into the ceramic pot, loose leaves of a darker green than she was used to, with a faint bloom of something almost like salt. Not until she had poured the water, and let it stand, and carried the cup back to the table.
Then, and only then, did she sit.
The blue cloth cover was plain, undecorated save for a small monogram stamped in faded gold at the lower right corner. The letters were worn, but she could make them out: E. H. She ran her thumb across them once, twice, feeling the slight ridge of the impression.
She opened the cover. The first page was dated, in a careful, slightly slanted hand.
October 12th, 1938.
The kettle began, very softly, to whistle.
She turned the page.
The entry was short. Her great-aunt, she realized, had been a woman of economy.
The wind has taken the thatch from the north side again. I have written to the men at the village, but I do not expect them before the week's end. The light is steady. I have begun to keep a record of the lamps, their hours, their moods. It seems a sensible thing to do.
There was no signature. Evangeline turned the page, and the next entry began.
October 19th, 1938.
A stranger came today. He said he was a surveyor, but he had no instruments about him, only a small leather case and a question about the road to the cove. I told him there was no road, only a path, and that it ended at the water. He thanked me, and went on. He had sad eyes.
Evangeline paused. She lifted the cup, sipped. The tea was stronger than she had expected, almost brackish, and there was a brightness to it that sat at the back of her tongue.
She read on, through entries that described the weather, the lamps, the slow accumulation of small domestic tasks. The hand was steady and unadorned, with the occasional word underlined once for emphasis. There were no drawings. There was no mention of the library, nor of any other person, until the entry dated November 2nd, 1938.
He has come again. The same man. He asked if he might shelter from the rain, and I could see no reason to refuse him. He set his case upon the table and did not open it, and he drank his tea in silence. When he left, he thanked me as though I had done him some great service, and the rain had nearly stopped.
The next entry, three days later, was longer.
November 5th, 1938.
He told me his name was Frost. He said it as though it were a thing he had only recently been given, and not yet grown accustomed to wearing. He asked if I might allow him to sit by the fire, and I said he might, and so he has done. He does not speak unless I speak first. His case is a violin case, though he has not offered to play.
Evangeline set the cup down. The tea had gone cold in her hands, and she had not noticed.
She turned the page, and then the next, and the next. The entries came more quickly now, and grew longer, though never by much. The man named Frost came again on the 9th, and again on the 14th, and on each visit the description of him grew a little more particular, a little more careful. He had removed his coat on the second visit. On the third, he had spoken of a sister, somewhere to the north, who no longer answered his letters. On the fourth, she had written that his hands were the hands of someone who worked with fine things, though he had not yet told her what work that was.
Evangeline read on, and the morning moved around her.
The fire burned down and she fed it without looking. The wind shifted, and the light in the window changed from grey to a thin, clear silver, then back to grey. She turned pages, and the story of her great-aunt's quiet acquaintance unfolded, slowly, like a flower pressed between the leaves of a very old book.
On the 22nd of November, he had opened the case.
It was not a violin, she wrote. It was a lute. A lute in poor condition, with a crack along the upper bout and a bridge that had been shimmed with a splinter of wood I could not identify. He turned it over in his hands as I have seen men turn over a child, and he did not ask me what I thought of it. He already knew.
He told me then what he was. A restorer. He had come down from the north to see the light, he said, because a man he had known in his youth had once spoken of it, and he had wanted to see if the man had been mistaken. He said the man had not been mistaken.
He stayed until the lamps were lit. I made him a supper of the broth I had been keeping, and he ate it at the table without complaint. He did not say where he would go next, and I did not ask.
The next entry was dated a week later.
November 29th, 1938.
He has gone. He left before I was awake, but he had set the fire and swept the hearth, and he had left a folded paper upon the table. It was not a letter. It was a drawing of the lamp, done in a hand I had not known he possessed, and it was accurate in every particular save one: he had drawn the keeper standing at the rail, though I had not been there when he had looked. I have folded it again, and I do not know where I shall keep it.
Evangeline closed the notebook.
She sat for some time with her hands upon the cover, and the room was very quiet, and the fire had burned down to a single crimson coal. The wind had dropped. The kettle no longer sang.
She stood, and crossed the room to the small press beside the hearth, and she opened it, and she looked among the folded linens and the cracked china until she found, at the very bottom, beneath a square of yellowed lace, a small packet of papers tied with a length of faded red ribbon.
She untied it, and unfolded the topmost sheet.
It was the drawing.
The lighthouse stood as she had seen it that morning, tall against a pale sky, its lamp rendered in careful crosshatching that gave the impression of a steady, golden bloom. The rails were drawn in clean, single lines, and the keeper stood upon them, exactly as her great-aunt had described, with her hands upon the rail and her face turned slightly toward the light. The eyes in the drawing were not her great-aunt's eyes. They were the eyes of the man who had drawn her.
Evangeline sat down again, and she looked at the drawing for a long while.
Then she reached for the notebook, and opened it once more, and turned, very slowly, to the final page.
The final entry was dated March 3rd, 1942.
He has come back. He is thinner than before, and his hands have a tremor I did not see in them four years ago. He has not spoken of where he has been, nor of the sister who would not answer his letters, though I have asked him, once, and he has only shaken his head. He has brought the lute with him, and it is no longer in poor condition. He has mended the crack, and the bridge is no longer shimmed, and the strings are new.
He played for me tonight. He played a piece I did not know, in a key I could not name, and when he had finished he sat with the lute across his knee and he did not look up. I asked him if he would stay, and he said he could not, and I did not ask him why.
I will not write of him again.
Beneath those words, in a slightly different ink, a single line.
The portrait is in the third drawer of the reading table.
Evangeline set the notebook down.
She stood. She crossed the room. She pulled open the third drawer of the small reading table that stood beneath the west window of the cottage, a piece of furniture she had not thought to examine, and she found, at the bottom, wrapped in a square of chamois leather, a small portrait in a frame of dark wood.
She unwrapped it.
The young man in the portrait had dark hair, and dark eyes, and a mouth that seemed to be on the edge of saying something he would not, in the end, say. He was dressed in a coat of dark cloth, and a shirt of a softer white than she had expected, and his hands, folded at the edge of a table whose edge just entered the frame at the lower right, were the hands of someone who worked with fine things.
The portrait was dated, in small, neat letters at the lower left, 1942.
The eyes in the portrait were the eyes in the drawing.
Evangeline sat down again, and she set the portrait upon the table beside the blue notebook, and she looked from one to the other, and then she looked out the window, where the wind had returned, and was moving through the long grass of the headland, and the lighthouse stood against the sky as it had stood for a hundred years and more, and the lamp within it was not yet lit, and the morning was nearly gone.
Morning bled into the cliffs in a wash of pewter and pale gold. Evangeline had not slept well, and the exhaustion sat in her shoulders like a weight she had not learned to set down. She rose, washed her face in the basin, and dressed in the same clothes she had arrived in, the ones that still carried the faint dust of travel, the road, the inn at Whitford where she had stopped the night before. She ate nothing. The bread on the counter was stale, and the thought of eating felt like a small surrender to the house.
She went out.
The wind met her at the door. It pressed the loose hair across her forehead, and she pushed it back, and walked around the cottage to the place where the sea opened below. Gulls wheeled in the thermals, their cries thin and torn, the kind of sound that seemed to belong to the cliffs more than to any living throat. Below, the water was green-black, and the rocks at the base of the headland were white with the droppings of generations of birds.
She walked along the path that curved up toward the lighthouse, her boots finding their way between the tussocks of grass and the low, wind-stunted gorse. The thorns caught at her skirt. She pulled free without looking down.
The lighthouse was taller than it had seemed from the road. Its base was whitewashed, though the whitewash was flaking away in long, curling strips that left the stone beneath grey and weathered. The door at its base was blue, once, and was now a faded thing, the paint cracked into a pattern that resembled, if one looked long enough, the cracked bed of a riverbed. There was a small porch before the door, and on the porch, a man was working.
He was on his knees, his back to her, his shoulders broad under a coat of dark green wool that had seen better years. He was sanding something, a long plank of wood held between two saw-horses, and the sandpaper made a low, rhythmic sound, like breathing, or like a small engine turning in the distance. Beside him, on the boards of the porch, sat a leather case, long and narrow, the leather of it scuffed and darkened at the edges. A violin case. She knew the shape of it from the drawings in her mother's notebooks, the ones her mother had made of a man who played.
The man did not look up.
"Good morning," Evangeline said.
The sanding stopped. He set the sandpaper down upon the plank, and he wiped his hands upon a rag that hung from his belt, and he turned, and he looked at her. His face was weathered in the manner of a man who had spent his life in the wind. His hair was dark, greying at the temples, and his eyes were the blue of the sea in certain lights, and there was a small scar above his left eyebrow that gave his expression a permanent quality of slight amusement, or slight suspicion, it was difficult to tell which.
"Morning," he said. His voice was low, and had the burr of the coast in it, the soft lilt that she had not heard in years, not since her grandmother had died.
"I'm the new owner of the cottage," she said. "Evangeline Marlowe."
He did not extend his hand. He nodded, once, and the nod carried with it a small weight of acknowledgment, and a larger weight of something that was not unfriendliness, but was not, either, quite welcome.
"Declan Frost," he said. "I keep the place."
She looked at the violin case, then back at him. He followed her gaze, and a small shift moved across his features, a tightening at the jaw, a slight lowering of the eyes.
"Restorer," he said, as if in answer to a question she had not asked. "I work on instruments. The old ones. I move about."
"And you have been keeping the cottage," she said. "For how long?"
"Fourteen years," he said. "Since the old woman passed. Your mother's aunt, I was told, though I never met her. I came to repair a spinet that had been left behind, and the roof was leaking, and I fixed the roof, and then the windows needed doing, and then the porch, and then the path, and I have not stopped."
He said it without apology, and without triumph. He said it as one might say that the tide came in, or that the wind blew from the west.
"The property is mine now," Evangeline said. She heard the carefulness in her own voice, the slight edge of a thing she had not meant to say, and she softened it, though not entirely. "I have the papers."
"I know you do," he said. "Mabel wrote to me. Three weeks ago. Said you would be coming, and that I ought to make myself useful about the place until you arrived." He picked up the sandpaper again, and turned back to the plank. "I have been making myself useful. The porch boards were rotted through. I am putting in new ones."
"I see that," she said. She did not move from where she stood. The wind pulled at the hem of her coat, and she held it closed with one hand. "I had not expected to find anyone here."
"Most people don't," he said. "Most people don't come at all."
There was a silence. The gulls cried. The sea below made a low, continuous sound, the sound of water against stone, the sound of something that had been saying the same thing for a very long time and was not tired of it.
"I would like to come inside," Evangeline said. "The lighthouse. Is it open?"
He stopped sanding. He did not turn around.
"The lamp is not lit," he said. "It has not been lit in thirty years. The mechanism is rusted. The stairs are not safe above the second landing."
"I would like to see it," she said. "All the same."
He turned then, and he looked at her for a long moment, and the look was not unkind, but it was the look of a man who was measuring the weight of a thing before he decided what to do with it.
"Follow me," he said.
He rose, and he wiped his hands again, and he lifted the violin case from the boards of the porch with a care that was almost tender, and he set it inside the door, and he closed the door behind him, and then he opened it again, and he held it for her.
The interior of the lighthouse was a single round room at the base, whitewashed, the whitewash yellowed with age, and in the centre of the room rose a column of dark iron, the central stair, and it wound upward into the dimness above, and the light that came through the small windows set into the curve of the wall was thin and grey. The air smelled of salt, and of iron, and of something else, faint, like the ghost of lamp oil, though the lamps had not been lit in decades.
"The mechanism is up above," he said. He pointed upward with a hand that was calloused at the fingertips, the hand of a man who worked with his hands, and had done so for a long time. "The lens is a Fresnel. First order. Came from France in 1861. It is a beautiful thing, even rusted. Even broken."
"You know about lighthouses," she said.
"I know about keeping things," he said. "I know that a thing which has been cared for lasts, and a thing which has not, does not. The lens has not been cared for in thirty years. It will not last another thirty."
He began to climb. She followed him. The stairs were narrow, and the iron was cold under her hand, and the sound of their footsteps rose in the round chamber and fell again, and above them, through the openwell of the stair, she could see the dimness rising, and the small windows passing, one by one, each one a small grey square of the morning.
They stopped at the second landing. Beyond, the stairs continued, but a length of rope had been strung across them, tied to the iron railing on one side and to a bolt in the wall on the other, and a small sign hung from the rope, hand-lettered in red paint.
"Unsafe," she read.
"I put that there," he said. "In the second winter. The third step from the top had rusted through. I fell through it, and caught myself on the rail, and bruised three ribs, and lay on the landing for an hour before I could get up." He touched the rope, lightly, with the tips of his fingers. "I have not been up since."
"You could have it repaired," she said.
"I could," he said. "I have not the money, and no one has asked me to."
They stood on the landing, and the wind outside made a low, continuous sound in the chimney of the stair, and the small window beside them was filled with the grey of the sea, and the white of the gulls, and the dark of the cliffs.
"You have not asked who I am," he said, after a time. "Most people ask."
"You are the man who has been keeping the cottage," she said. "You are a restorer of instruments. You have a violin in a case that you treat with great care."
He looked at her, and the slight amusement, or slight suspicion, in his expression shifted, and became something else, something that was not quite a smile, but was the beginning of one.
"It was my mother's," he said. "She played it. She taught me the trade. I have carried it with me for thirty years, and I have not opened the case in twelve."
"Why not?" she said.
"Because," he said, and he stopped, and the word sat in the air between them, and the wind filled the silence that came after. "Because there is no one to play it for."
They descended in silence. At the door of the lighthouse, he held it for her again, and she stepped out onto the porch, and the wind met her, and the sea below was a long, low sound, and the gulls were still crying, and the morning was nearly gone.
"The porch will be finished by tomorrow," he said. "I will be gone by the end of the week. There is a clavichord in the upper room of the cottage that needs attention. I will see to it before I go."
"I did not say you must go," she said.
He looked at her, and the look was long, and was not unkind.
"You did not say I must stay," he said.
She opened her mouth, and closed it again. The wind moved through the long grass of the headland, and the lighthouse stood against the sky, and the lamp within it was not lit, and somewhere in the cottage below, in the upper room, an instrument waited that had not been played in a very long time.
"Then stay," she said. "At least until the clavichord is done."
He did not answer, then. He picked up the sandpaper, and he knelt again, and the sanding began, the low, rhythmic sound of it rising into the morning, and she stood for a moment longer, and then she turned, and she walked back along the path, and the wind was at her back, and the cottage waited, and the notebooks waited, and the portrait in its frame of dark wood waited, and the eyes in the portrait, which were the eyes in the drawing, which were the eyes of a man who had been here before her, and who had perhaps never entirely left, watched her go.
In the porch of the lighthouse, Declan Frost sanded the boards, and the violin case sat inside the door, and the morning passed, and the wind did not cease, and the sea went on saying the same thing it had always said, and the light, when it came, was the pale, particular light of a place that has been loved, and neglected, and loved again, and the man on the porch did not look up, but he did not stop, and the sound of the sandpaper was steady, and the boards beneath his hands grew smooth, and the day moved on.