THE ARRIVAL OF a new year brings baby pink skies and the first snow of the winter. The north wind bites at my cheeks as I tend to the hens, more grateful than ever for the waterproof mackintosh cloak sent as a Christmas gift from the duke and duchess. They have been extremely generous since we visited the castle. Mam is beside herself with her gift of a silver teapot, using it at least four times a day. I am equally taken with my gift of a watch. It is quite beautiful although it makes me all too aware of the passing of time and the increasing distance between the simple life I’d once known, and the continued complications of public scrutiny.
Under the duke’s wardship I am, at last, free of the incessant interference of Robert Smeddle. Once a week I sit to reply to any new correspondence. The letters are much fewer in number now and it is not the onerous task it once was. The duke writes often regarding the trust fund and legal matters concerning the sums of money held in my name. I have agreed to take no more than five pounds every six months. As I expressed in a recent letter to the duke: My prosperity was neither expected, nor desired, sir. I wish only to carry on here in my duties, and to be a good daughter.
Although the initial fascination from the public has thankfully diminished a little, the summer months of the previous year had seen the profiteering fishermen resume their boat trips, the decks crowded with people eager to see Longstone’s heroine. Reluctant to visit the Main, where my appearance always causes unwanted attention, I spend more and more time at the lighthouse, focusing on the job of maintaining the seven apartments and assisting my father and brother with the lamp when needed.
I write often to my sister Thomasin, to whom I have always felt the closest connection and who has offered the most understanding and common sense over the past year. She, alone, knows of my secret affection for George Emmerson, having eventually prized the truth from me. She knows how it both pains and delights me to hear news of him from Sarah Dawson. Time heals, they say, and yet I still feel an ache of regret when I open my locket and see the little portraits inside, remembering the calm morning when Mr. Emmerson had pressed the mussel shell into my hands.
Sarah sent word of George and Eliza’s wedding the previous summer, it having been delayed by Eliza falling dangerously ill over the winter. Having nearly lost her appears to have only endeared George more to his new wife. The wedding, Sarah wrote, was a very happy affair. There was much dancing and merry-making. As you know, Miss Darling, I doubted the union, but they are very happy together and George is quite settled, much to the surprise of us all. I expect they will start a family soon. Eliza makes no secret of her desire for a large brood and George was always such a doting uncle to James and Matilda. It would be lovely to see him become a father.
I replied to tell her how pleased I was to hear all was well and that, having completed his studies in Dundee, George had taken a small gallery in Durham, where he and Eliza had set up home. I didn’t write of how often I open the locket to study the little images inside, nor how often I remember the days Mr. Emmerson spent with us at Longstone.
The first weeks of this new year bring happy news that our sister Mary Ann is expecting a child in the summer. She has already lost four children, and the poor thing is understandably anxious. We do our best to reassure her, but we all worry, Mam especially. I pray for the safe delivery of the child, and for Mary Ann to safely navigate the perilous business of childbirth. Another reason, if one were needed, to avoid the institution of marriage.
As winter releases its grip on the Farne Islands and the puffins and kittiwakes return to their nesting sites, we are blessed with a clutch of adorable eider ducklings scampering about the place. I watch them whenever I have the opportunity, enjoying the peep and chirp as they call to one another. With the winter storms passed and the sun warming my bones as I go about my chores, I feel a lightness of spirit I had thought lost to me forever. But the joys of the springtime are short-lived and a deep melancholy falls upon the family as we learn of the sudden death of Mary Ann’s husband. Mam insists she return to Longstone so that we can take care of her in the final months of her pregnancy.
The poor thing is inconsolable. We do as much as we can for her, but she weeps continually, her face pale as milk, her eyes devoid of their usual brightness. It is a pitiful sight to see her belly so swollen and to know that the child will never know its father. He was a good man. It seems that it must always be the good ones who are taken from us too soon.
Despite a difficult labor which we all assist with in one way or another, Mary Ann is delivered of a delightfully pink and chubby little girl in the summer. She names her Georgiann, for her departed husband, George. I am fascinated by the way the child squirms in my arms and mewls like the kittens we raised on Brownsman. I sit with her for hours, delighted by the way she curls her impossibly dainty fingers around mine so assuredly. I quite love her already. With Brooks then announcing he is to be married to an admirable young girl from Craster, Mam is at her spinning wheel all the hours of the day to make enough thread for the dresses and bonnets we shall all need.
By the autumn, Brooks and his new wife, Jane, are settled with us at Longstone. Our numbers swell with every spring tide, and I believe they will soon grow again with Jane walking about the place like a ghost, retching at the smell of bacon rind, her face as gray as the seals. Mam is delighted to have her family around her again, but I am not quite so enthralled.
I make light of it in my letters to Thomasin, remarking that market day in Bamburgh couldn’t be as busy as the lighthouse with everyone’s endless chatter and demands. With so many opinions to take into consideration and so many mouths to feed, I don’t quite feel myself. It is an age since I searched for fossils or read poetry with any serious attention to the words. I am irritable and easily distracted, and unusually short-tempered. But I cannot entirely blame my family for my bad mood. Since Sarah sent news at the start of the year that Eliza is with child, I have been unsettled. In my reply to Sarah I expressed my delight for them, but my words betrayed the pangs of jealousy and regret in my heart.
During long hours on watch, I find myself wondering whether I might have felt differently about remaining here if my family had descended on the lighthouse a year earlier. Might I have felt less obliged to stay and assist my parents if there had always been so many able hands willing to help? Might I have given Mr. Emmerson some encouragement in his obvious affections for me?
But there is little point in wishing things were different. No more than King Canute could turn back the tide, can I stop the momentum of fate nor alter what is done.
A LETTER FROM Longstone lighthouse brightens Sarah Dawson’s day, although she is a little troubled to read how Miss Darling feels the weight of her unexpected notoriety pressing on her shoulders. I don’t mind telling you that I wish to be free of it now, Sarah. It drags about me like a yoke around a milkmaid’s shoulders and weakens me. I do not feel myself. For a young woman who has spent her life living beneath the light, it is perhaps no surprise that she feels uncomfortable now that the beam has fallen upon her.
Without the demands of a family to keep her occupied, Sarah is grateful to have found a position in the past year as cook and cleaner for a local bookbinder, Eamonn Flaherty. There is something about the lilt of Mr. Flaherty’s Irish accent that appeals to the singsong in Sarah’s ear. He is a kind man, a widower himself, and treats her with the greatest respect, almost as ashamed to find himself in need of a woman to help him as Sarah Dawson is to wash another man’s smalls. As something of a tentative friendship develops between them, Mr. Flaherty tells her of the green fields of Ireland and how he hopes to go back there one day to where his father keeps a lighthouse in Donegal on the Atlantic coast. It is the prettiest place in all the world, he tells her. Sarah says she would like to go there one day, and it sets his mind to thinking.
If only George could settle, she might almost consider herself content for the first time since the Forfarshire disaster, but he is distracted when he writes and even more so when he visits. Although he cares for Eliza very much, Sarah knows he doesn’t love her the way he loved Miss Darling. He has admitted as much in his letters, saying how he hopes the child will improve matters when it arrives. Sarah cautions him, warning that an infant, no matter how precious, cannot fix what is broken and that he expects too much of a child not yet safely delivered into the world. It leaves Sarah ill at ease as she rolls pastry for the apple pie she is making for Mr. Flaherty’s supper, wishing she could as easily make a happy future for her brother.