‘You are,’ Edie said.

‘I can still come for my lessons, then?’

There was a pause. When Gilly looked up, Edie was watching her. ‘I’d be pissed off if you didn’t,’ the artist said. ‘You’d have wasted all that paper for nothing.’

Gilly was annoyed at herself for how relieved she felt.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go up to the bookshop tomorrow. Promise.’

Nineteen

‘You say you’ve already put all the papers in date order?’ Toby asked.

It was Sunday afternoon, and he and Rachel were in the camera obscura room, looking at the storm of documents and notebooks around their feet. He’d made her breakfast at the cottage, embarrassed by his behaviour in the early hours. Rachel hadn’t referred to it at all, as if it were entirely to be expected that the man who had offered you his spare room should wake you screaming in the night. He could still remember the weight of her warm hand against his shoulder and holding onto his wrist, how she hadn’t pulled away when he’d held onto her fingers as the last vestiges of the dream had finally receded.

‘As far as I could, yes,’ Rachel said. ‘I was hoping that as I was doing so, I’d at least work out who E.A.M. was, but so far I’ve had no such luck.’

Rachel had opened the camera obscura to show him how it worked, and the image of Newton Dunbar glimmered, pin-sharp on the marble plinth. He tore his attention away from watching the movement of a small figure amble down the main street and lowered himself to a patch of bare floor, ignoring the protest of his leg. ‘Tell me what you’ve worked out so far.’

‘Well, the earliest date I could find was in that notebook there,’ Rachel said, crouching beside him and pointing to a small book bound in blue. ‘That’s dated 1807.’

‘That book is two hundred and fourteen years old?’ he said, flabbergasted. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘I know. The handwriting is really hard to read, but it seems to be a kind of diary. It’s full of sketches of lighthouses, but if you look through you’ll see – they’re not realistic. It’s as if it’s just someone drawing their idea of a lighthouse, over and over in different forms as a favourite pastime.’

‘Like doodles, you mean?’ Toby asked.

‘Yes, exactly. In between there are notes about outings the writer has taken, things like that. The most serious notes specifically about lighthouses that I could decipher are about the Bell Rock light tower, which was being built that year. There’s a sketch that’s labelled with the name of a tower that looks as if it’s being constructed directly into the sea, and beside it is written, Such a marvel! Such ingenuity! Mr Stevenson is a man of the truest genius! But that’s it. Then I couldn’t find any more dates until 1812.’

‘Six years,’ mused Toby. ‘Why the gap, I wonder?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rachel said, ‘but when they start up again, there’s a definite difference.’ Rachel indicated the next small pile, which contained two notebooks and a scroll.