He looked down at her hand, becoming mock serious. “I don’t see a ring. Doesn’t seem like a fair arrangement to me, to agree to marry somebody and not get a ring. Especially if the man is a doctor.”
A sense of disappointment washed over her, the realization that everybody knew she was supposed to marry James. She liked him well enough, but the truth was that while she’d been quite impressed by his stories about London when he’d first arrived in Porthsennen, now that she’d heard all those, sometimes twice, she wasn’t sure what there was left that she liked so much anymore.
“Well, what would you know?” she asked, defensively.
“I know a bit,” he said, still smiling.
“Asked a lot of girls to marry you, have you?”
“Not yet I haven’t,” he told her, laughing. “But when I do, I’ll make sure I do it with a ring.”
It was impossible not to feel foolish, being engaged without a ring to a man she wasn’t all that sure about. Yet for some reason she still felt obliged to defend it. “Look, if you must know, he hasn’t been home to collect it yet. It’s a family heirloom.”
He was still smiling, but this time sincerity shone from it. “It’s none of my business. But if I was marrying you, I certainly wouldn’t be leaving you without a ring. I’d want everybody to know you were mine.”
“Oh,” she said, aware that her face was growing hotter by the second. A cool draft crept in from the window and so she moved toward it.
“But that’s beside the point. You’re marrying Dr. Warbeck, aren’t you?”
“Y-yes,” she stuttered. “Yes, I am.”
A moment of silence got the conversation back on track. “So, jokes aside, you didn’t just come here to say thank you or return my clothes.”
She shook her head. “No, there was something else. I wanted to ask you about what happened,” she said. “I thought it was better to do that in private, without prying ears. It’s about how my mother ended up in the water.”
He took a heavy breath in and did up the buttons on his coat, all traces of that cheekiness lost. “I know somewhere we can go, if you like. It’ll be warmer there than it is here, at least.” Picking up a small satchel of his own, he turned to the steps. A moment later he stopped, that smirk returning. “Come on, then. That is, unless you think people will talk, what with you being as good as married and all?”
* * *
They left the lifeboat station behind and walked through the village, just stirring from the blustery night before. The small cottage in which Elizabeth knew that Tom lived with his parents produced a thin slither of smoke from its chimney. His mother was probably already working. Thoughts of Tom’s brother came to mind. Gossip had reverberated around the village after Daniel’s death, the women decrying what a terrible shame it was to lose a little lad like that, whispering of how he should never have been left alone, but Elizabeth couldn’t remember exactly what had happened.
After a climb up the headland, they reached the old Mayon Lookout. It was a small structure, cubical almost, a granite buttress carved from local rock standing high on the craggy prominence. From here you could see across Longships reef to the lighthouse of the same name, all the way to Cape Cornwall in the north and Land’s End in the south. The building had lain derelict since it was decommissioned as a coastguard lookout in the 1940s, yet as Tom pulled open the creaky wooden door, she saw evidence of life before her in the shape of a small pile of black ashes in the corner of the room, a gas cooking stove, and a wicker fishing creel that looked to have seen better days. The crumbling window frames shook as the wind struck the glass.
Standing on the threshold of the old lookout, Elizabeth listened as the hinges on the fishing creel creaked when Tom lifted the lid, then watched as he produced a hand-stitched quilt, which he shook out into the space before him. It gave off a faint scent of the ocean as he passed one end to Elizabeth. “It’ll be much warmer if you get under here.”
She wanted to, but the story would travel faster than a coastal wind if anybody saw her sneaking away with a local boy like that. A Hale, no less.
“Nobody saw us coming here,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “And you’re quite safe. I’m not about to try anything.”
It felt adventurous in some way to be with Tom, independent and exciting. The door slammed shut behind her, and she found a position on the stone floor. Keeping his word, Tom draped the quilt over her legs, and Elizabeth was aware that as he did so his face brushed close to hers, his breathing audible. A smile crossed her lips when his gaze flicked to hers, and suddenly her mouth felt dry. When she thought of the gossip that would abound if anybody knew, her smile faded, and with that Tom pulled away.
“Who sewed this?” she asked as she looked down at the quilt for a distraction. It was how she imagined the earth might look from above if she could see all the irregular rock walls and multicolored fields knitted together.
“My grandmother,” he said, pointing to some of the scalloped edges. “And then my mother added these bits. It’s kind of a family tradition. Something they hand down upon marriage. In fact, I think this bit might have been my great-grandmother’s.”
“It’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said. “What are you doing with it?”
“It’s the best quilt we have in our house. And it’s cold up here.”
“You could just go home,” she suggested. “That’s what most people do after work.”
“Suppose it depends on the home.” It was an idea she could understand. Since her mother got sick, she had wanted less and less to return home at the end of the day.
“It’s very nice,” she said, not wanting to think of her reluctance to go home, or face the truth her family was trying to hide.
“Grandpa was a herder, you see,” Tom said, his attention focused on the quilt. “One of the landsmen. Kept sheep out near Kelynack.” It was a small settlement only a few miles from there. “That’s why Nanna chose browns and yellows. For the land. Mum added the blues for the sea, because Dad is a fisherman.” It was his turn for a moment of unease, as he tried to clarify what he had said. “At least, he was a fisherman, before he started drinking.”
Elizabeth knew that Pat Hale’s drinking corresponded to the loss of Tom’s brother, but she didn’t want to ask about it. So instead she watched as Tom set about lighting the small gas stove, after which he produced a pan from his fishing creel. He filled it with water and set it to boil before sitting down next to her. The warmth felt good, so Elizabeth held her hands close to it. When he opened the edge of the quilt, resting his legs underneath, it didn’t feel wrong, but still her gaze flicked to the door to ensure they were alone. It surprised her to realize that she wanted that, to be just the two of them.
“Do you like being a fisherman?” she asked him.
Checking the water as bubbles began to rise, he shook his head. “Not much, but it pays okay. I don’t really like the sea.”
“I love the sea,” she told him.
“I doubt you would like it very much if you did my job. There’s not much fun to be had waking in the dark and waiting for fish to catch every morning.” He dropped a tea bag in the water and dabbed at it with a spoon. “I’d have rather stayed at school like you did. But after Daniel died I had to leave. We needed the money.”