Page 102 of Faceless

“I am nothing of the kind. I am a very proper and demure wife.” She turned his hand over and resumed her examination — the variation towards the thumb she had been meaning to investigate more thoroughly — and she was unhurried about it, and gave him nothing of suspicion in her voice at all.

He exhaled at length, the slow, loose breath of a crisis past.

She turned his hand over once more and laid her palm flat against his.

Lizzy.

The name her father had used, and Jane, and Charlotte, but no one else who had not known her in another life. Many a woman named Elizabeth was called Lizzy, but the man whose hand she was holding had used it as if he had had the name in him for months. That, and the hair she had finally dared to compare tonight, the jaw and the brow… and she found she was losing the argument she had been making all day.

She set the argument down where it would not bite her — it would still be there in the morning, she knew herself too well to imagine otherwise — and let it lie.

If this were Fitzwilliam Darcy, the man she had taken the measure of in a Meryton assembly room and never bothered to look at more carefully, then she had been wrong about him, and being wrong about him was not the worst thing she had ever been required to be wrong about.

He had told her tonight that he loved her when he had nothing to gain by it, and she had no reason to doubt him. He had been the man across her supper table for four months, and she had come to care for him in some fashion she had no intention of giving a clearer name to in the small hours, with answers she was dying for and no prospect of getting them tonight.

If this were Fitzwilliam Darcy, the man who once said disguise was his abhorrence, he had some accounting to do for her. Something had broken along that line, but he was too prideful a man to allow it permanently. He would bring her the truth when he could — his dignity would suffer no less.

The name, she could wait for. The man, she was already holding.

In the meantime — and she permitted herself the observation in the privacy of the dark, where no one but her husband, whoever he turned out to be, could be inconvenienced by it — he had given a remarkably good account of himself as a husband.

XXXIX

By Degrees

He had been drawing his arm from beneath her by degrees — each small movement held while he listened for the change in her breathing that would mean she had surfaced — when she snored. It was small, from the back of her throat. She did not wake from it. He sat on the edge of the mattress with his arm finally free, and waited until it came again.

Then he rose, gathered his clothes from the chair, and dressed near the corridor door where the floorboards had proved more forgiving. When he was done, he crossed back to the bed, kissed her forehead, and laid his palm against her cheek — the gesture she had described back to him, with rather too much accuracy, not two hours ago. She did not stir. The rasping from the back of her throat did not cease, and some portion of him that had been braced since he had uttered the name Lizzy came out of him eased.

He moved towards the corridor door, and in the dark, his foot came down nearly on Falstaff.

The dog had placed himself between the bed and the door and was awake, his chin up, his attention on Darcy and unwavering, making no sound. He put his nose out and investigated Darcy’s hand, then made a sound low in his throat — not a bark, something considerably below that, a question without urgency — and scuffled his feet towards the door.

Darcy considered the door. He had meant to go out alone, had known since the whisper broke and her thumb continued unhurried over his palm that the mural chamber was not going to hold him tonight, and he had lain beside her until her breathing had gone beyond anything he could reasonably doubt, and the walk had been the shape of his intention the whole time.

He had not accounted for the dog.

“Come along, then.” Falstaff stood.

The kitchen passage was dark, the outer door stiff with cold, and the November wind came off the water the moment he cleared the threshold and did not trouble itself to be gradual about it. Seven months, and the cold off the North Sea was still a matter between him and the wind that the two of them had not yet brought to terms. He put his head down and walked.

He had learned the headland path entirely in the dark by now — the point where the coastal grass gave way to exposed stone and the wind turned on him from the water side, the hollow where it dropped for twenty feet before rising again with renewed conviction. Falstaff had no such concerns and ranged in no pattern Darcy could discern, disappearing into the dark and reappearing as a large grey shape against the larger grey of the winter sky, then lost again.

He had been calling her Lizzy in his head since Hertfordshire. It had never been a choice, which was the root of the difficulty. Her family called her Lizzy. He had pictured her laughing, the girl she was before her father's death, in the mural chamber in July, and the name had taken up residence in his private accounting of her, and he had not, since, found a way to dislodge it.

Tonight, with her mouth against his neck and the warmth of the dark and her voice naming his private gestures back to him one by one, the laugh had come from somewhere below his ribs before he could prevent it, and Lizzy had come with the laugh.

She had heard it.

He was not going to persuade himself otherwise. Her thumb had continued its examination of his palm without any perceptible pause, and she had teased him once more and then quieted with her lips pressed against his skin. The tranquility of it had been so complete that for three heartbeats, he had almost believed it was all harmless.

Elizabeth was anything but harmless. But he did not believe she knew, either, and this was the argument he had been making to himself since the corridor door, and he made it again now because the cold was clarifying and he had not yet finished with it.

A woman who believed the man she had married was one who had found her not worth crossing a room for would not have put her hands to his face tonight with that determined passion. She would not have lain in his arms, given and taken pleasure, cried out for him in the dark, and then teased him so scandalously.

She was too honest. She could not perform warmth at that depth without feeling it, and had she been performing, he would have heard the strain by now — he knew every tone, every inflection, every catch of her breath and touch of her hand. Beyond any power he had to doubt it, she had been real with him.

Therefore, she could not know.