Page 104 of Faceless

Jane’s Letter

Angus was coming up from the village road as she turned through the gate, his breath showing white, a packet under one arm.

“Post,” he said, and held it out.

She took it and saw the hand on the top, and a pleasure she had not had on any morning in a great many months ran through her. Two letters in the same week, after months of nothing. She tucked the packet under her arm before she could let herself feel any of it too clearly.

“Thank you. How is it below?”

He fell into step, slightly behind, giving the question its due consideration. “MacAulay’s second boy has taken the Sutherland girl from Braehead. Morag.”

“Has he?” She had spoken with Morag Sutherland at the harvest and come away thinking there was not a shrewder head within five miles of Auchengray, which made young MacAulay considerably more fortunate than he knew. “When?”

“Saturday last, at the minister’s.”

“I must send something for the house. Something useful. I will ask Mrs MacLeod what would serve them best.” She shifted the packet. “And Mrs Gillies? Her time was very near.”

“Tuesday last. A boy. Both keeping well.”

“Good.” She had sat with Agnes Gillies in October when the woman’s back had been giving her trouble, and they had talked about nothing important for an hour and it had done them both some good. “I want coal enough sent for them through January. A new baby needs a warm house. And old James, is his roof holding after Dougal went up last week?”

“He says it’ll do.”

“He says it’ll do or it will do?”

Angus gave her something near a smile. “It will do.”

“Good. The minister was asking about Christmas?”

“Aye. The whole village will be watching what the house does. It has been some years since there was a laird here for it.”

She stood with her hand on the kitchen door. The whole village would have its eyes on the house. Herself standing here as the person who decided what it did.

“Then we shall do it properly,” she said. “Let me speak with Mrs MacLeod.”

The housekeeper heard her out without interrupting, which was a form of respect she extended to very few things.

Elizabeth had laid it out plainly — something for every household, coal or salt meat or flour as was most wanted, Mrs MacLeod would know better than she did what each family needed. Something for Angus and for herself that was not merely useful but was a genuine pleasure. For the house, another attempt at Yorkshire Pudding and better wine than usual, enough to mark the occasion without making a project of it.

“There’s still six bottles o’ the old Madeira in the lower cellar, mistress. Sixty-three, if the chalk’s to be trusted. The old laird swore they’d no’ be touched till the house saw Christmas properly again. I’ve kept them this long, so I suppose we may as well see whether he kent what we was saving them for.”

A slow smile stole over Elizabeth’s face. “And in all those years, Mrs MacLeod, you never thought to sample the Madeira for yourself?”

“Aye, and if I’d drunk the whole cellar dry, ye’d scarcely blame me after thirty winters rattling about this place wi’ nought but Angus for company. Though I’ll no deny one bottle met an honourable end the year the east roof near came down atop us. Another after the old mastiff died. Beyond that, I kept my hands off the laird’s cellar better than most men would have managed.”

Elizabeth laughed. “You will hear nothing on the matter from me, Mrs MacLeod. You and Angus shall have a bottle for Christmas, and so shall the baron and I. As to the rest, I will ask him. Whatever his preferences, we will still send to the tenants. He would want the village to have what it needs.”

Mrs MacLeod turned back to her shelves. “I’ll see to it.”

Elizabeth nodded and went back to the library with the satisfaction of having done as he would have wanted. That much, she need not ask.

She knew parts of him now with an intimacy more aggravating than ignorance had ever been — the jaw rough at the end of a long day, the clean angle of the cheekbone, the broad brow, the straight nose. None of it yielded an entire face when she had no visual markers to compare it to, but now that she had a prospect, the details were now beginning to match with alarming clarity.

What pressed hardest was not the face, but the intricacies of understanding she had pulled from him, thread by thread. And she was confident of it now.

He knew Longbourn.

Not the facts a paid inquiry could gather, but the intimacy of emphasis — the scale of the rooms she had grown up in, the flurry and busyness of a household with five daughters, the way the pianoforte had angled just so away from the window, and the way she always littered books haphazardly around the house.