“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