Elizabeth heard the sentence as it was meant—not accusation but grief for the burdened whole.
“Nor do I,” she said.
His eyes met hers again. “Then help me understand what I can.”
There it was again—not demand for every secret, not yet, but a plain request for enough truth to act honourably. The bag’s absence was upon her as if it lay beneath her hand. It had been moved during her unconsciousness after the lane, deeper into the wall recess behind the parlour chest, where no casual search would find it and where each layer of concealment made future confession harder.
She opened her mouth. Nothing safe came.
At last she said, “I am trying.”
The answer was miserable. She knew it. He knew it.
“So am I,” he said.
He inclined his head and left.
Afterhisdeparturethehouse sank gradually into evening. Georgiana did not come down. Jane remained upstairs with her longer than usual and later, passing the parlour, did not enter. Mrs Reeves sent a tray and a command to eat. Elizabeth obeyed without appetite. She asked Mrs Reeves to send down a book, but none ever came.
Outside, the wind changed quarter and moved over the mere with a sound like a hand dragged the wrong way over dark silk.
The pain in her leg had driven sleep off entirely. The quarter struck. The half. Elizabeth lay with her hand on the edge of the bed and her ear turned towards the corridor, and did not let herself listen as plainly as she was listening.
The footstep, when it came, she knew at three paces.
He stood at the door for the length of a knock he did not give. Then he came in. He had not put on a coat. He had a book under his arm. He had the air of a man who had been sitting in his study with that book on his knee for an hour, waiting to be sent for.
He did not look at her face.
“Mrs Reeves said you wished a candle and a book,” he said. “I have brought both.”
“Thank you.”
“I… have no other employment this evening.”
It was notyes. It was not the welcome the sentence was meant to produce. He stood in the doorway for the length it would take a man to consider whether his being there had been an error.
“I shall read aloud, if you wish it. Or set the book by the candle and go. As you prefer.”
She had nothing in her throat at first. The leg had taken a turn while he was speaking and she had had to attend to the leg before she could attend to the question. “I would be obliged if you would stay.”
He came in. He did not pull the chair quite to the side of the bed. He pulled it a hand’s breadth further out than he had pulled it on the previous nights. He sat down with the book on his knee and did not open it at once.
“What did you bring?” she said, because the silence had become a thing she could not lie in.
“An account of the late war in the Peninsula. Translated from the Spanish. Tactical history. It is exceedingly dull.”
“Then it will do.”
He opened the book to a place that already had a ribbon in it. He found his line. He cleared his throat.
His voice, at first, was the voice of a man reading in the room of someone with whom he was not quite on speaking terms—a degree more formal than the words required, the pace more measured than the prose deserved, an instrument trying to take up no more room in the air than was strictly its right. He did not look up at the ends of paragraphs. He did not stop to remark on what he read.
The voice came down out of formality within the first quarter hour. Whether this was because Spanish tactical history forgave no actor and required all of a reader’s attention, or because his own body had at last consented to be in the chair, she could not have said. It came into the voice he used with Georgiana on her bad nights—unhurried, deliberate, willing to repeat a sentence if the sentence wanted repeating, careful with the names of places no English tongue had been designed to honour.
The pain in her leg did not go. The pain in her leg did, however, find something else to follow.
She watched his hands turn the pages. She watched the candle pick out the line of his jaw. She watched his mouth shape the sentences in a language he had been competent in since school. He did not, in the hour and a half he read, look at her face except atthe intervals required by a man checking that his patient had not slept. When he did look, he looked at the angle of her shoulder against the pillow, at the line of the coverlet over her good leg, at the place above her wrist where the pulse showed—and not, by any straightforward route, at her eyes.
