Page 1 of Faceless

The Dark

The candle went out before the door opened.

She heard it — the soft collapse of the flame, the brief smell of smoke — and then the latch, and the dark came in complete.

Elizabeth had not been ready, had not moved from where she had been standing since the older woman led her in. Mrs MacLeod had crossed to the table as soon as she heard the boots on the stairs and had snuffed the wick with her thumb and fingers a breath before the latch went up. Now she was somewhere in the dark with Elizabeth and the men who had just come in, and Elizabeth was glad of her.

She stayed standing in the middle of the bed chamber, her hands loose at her sides and shaking, while the door closed again and she was no longer alone with only Mrs MacLeod. She could not count them by sound. The floor gave nothing. The walls gave back only the sea.

Mrs MacLeod had shown her the room only ten minutes ago, when she arrived — had opened the door, stood aside, and said only “this will be yours, my lady,” in an accent Elizabeth had not yet learned to understand. There was a bed in it. A large one, old, with hangings she could not see now and had registered them only by their colour and the weight of the wool. There was a washstand. There was a press. A long table had been laid at the far end of the room with what she took for supper under silver covers — she had not crossed to look, but the smell of the food came faintly across the space without resolving into anything familiar.

And it was in this room — this room, with the bed — that she was being married. Not a drawing room, and certainly not a church. Her bedroom. She had not asked the reason. She had been asking no questions since Aberdeen. The answer would not alter the fact of the bed.

A man’s whisper, low and to her left, greeted the servants who were to stand as witness. Not even her family to stand with her today, but servants, under this man’s employ. “Mrs MacLeod?”

“Aye.” Somewhere behind her.

“Angus.”

“Aye.” Near the door.

He did not greet her yet. Did not say her name, but she felt him pass by, the whisper of her skirts as his boots approached. He was inches from her now, and all she knew of him was the smell of his shaving lotion and the sound of his footsteps.

The solicitor, she had already placed by his breathing and the rustle of papers that had not ceased since the light went out. He was to her right, a yard perhaps, and she fixed her attention in the direction of his sound the way she might fix it on the horizon in a rough crossing. It did not help. It was the only thing she had.

She was cold. She had been cold since Aberdeen, since the road turned north along the coast and the wind came off the water and did not stop. The cold here was different from Hertfordshire cold — it was older, it lived in the stone, and the stone was everywhere. It rose from the walls she could not see and from the floor through the thin soles of her travelling shoes, and she thought, absurdly, that she had not brought enough wool.

The solicitor cleared his throat. “The parties present are George Carlisle, Baron of Auchengray, and Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn in Hertfordshire. If each is freely resolved to proceed, you may speak your declarations.”

George.

She had not known the name before this moment. She let it find its place with the rest, because one more unknown was only one more unknown, and she had stopped counting them somewhere on the road north.

“Miss Bennet.”

The whisper came almost choked, as if he could hardly bring himself to form the syllables. But it was this fresh reminder of his proximity that shuddered through her before she could prevent it. She made herself stay still, but she did manage a “I am here.”

“Are you determined?”

Three words in a whisper she could not place, could not recognise, pitched so low it seemed to belong to the room rather than to any man in it. He would not use his full voice, and she did not know why. The candle had been extinguished before the door opened. She knew nothing at all about the man standing two feet away from her in the dark — and in four minutes she would be his wife, and Jane would be safe, and Lydia would be safe, and her mother would not die of nerves in a hedgerow, and that was the whole of what she knew.

“Yes,” she said.

A small rustle moved in front of her — the man turning towards her, she thought. Then the whisper that would seal her fate.

“I, George Carlisle, Baron of Auchengray, take you, Elizabeth Bennet, as my wife. From this hour, before these witnesses. Before God.”

The whisper was deliberate, and it had in it something she had not expected — not the brisk detachment of a legal transaction, but attention, close and unguarded, as though each word were being given rather than merely spoken.

“I take you into my care and into my house and into my name. I will ask nothing of you that you have not agreed to give. Whatever honour belongs to me, I pledge to you, and whatever protection, and whatever peace I am able to find. From this hour, until death do we part.”

She had prepared for the speaking. She had not prepared for the hearing.

He spoke her name, and the darkness swallowed his face, and the whisper stripped his voice of everything she might have used to learn to understand him, and she stood in the middle of all of it and she shook.

Silence. The solicitor did not speak. Mrs MacLeod did not speak. No one filled it with murmurs of approval or attendance. They were waiting for her.

She had to speak. She had to speak now. The silence was asking her to.