Page 107 of Faceless

Emma, the daughter of the household, saw Edmund clearly before the portrait, before the haunted wing, before any of the revelation had begun. She had only to attend to him to see what was there, and needed no further explanation. Elizabeth closed the book briefly on her thumb. That was either the most romantic thing she had read in some years or the most aggravating, and she could not decide which.

She opened it again.

The mystery of Edmund’s birth drove towards its resolution, and something quickened in her chest that had nothing to do with the gothic machinery — the kind of urgency that came only when a novel had been built honestly, and the answer was already half-known. Someone had taken his birthright. Someone had arranged with great care that he should not know who he was. Someone had constructed a concealment that had stood for twenty years, and now it was coming apart piece by piece. Edmund bore it with the patience she had been receiving across a supper table for four months.

She lowered the book.

The snow was heavier at the window. The fire had burned down without her tending to it, but her mind turned on another point, entirely. A man concealed…

She had held his face in her hands in the dark and traced the shape of it in the small hours and known, with a certainty her hands had brought before her mind had been ready for it, that the face was a face she had seen before.

Seen. Across some room. At her side. In another life. The conclusion her hands had been pressing towards was no longer a conclusion she could honestly refuse, and the only argument left to her against it was the picture she had carried since Hertfordshire of a Mr Darcy who could not, by any natural measure of the man, have done what George Carlisle had done.

A man did not build what had been built here for trivial reasons. A man did not go to this trouble, at this cost, unless the alternative was considerably worse.

She looked down at the book.

She held the title in her mind, searching her memory of her father’s shelves at Longbourn, the disorder she had known since childhood and could still walk shelf by shelf if she chose. She could not place it there. She was nearly certain she had never seen this title before, and yet it had the feeling of something known, something half-remembered, the feeling of a book that had been sitting somewhere in the back of her mind for years waiting to be found.

She ought to send it to her sisters. Kitty would read it for the haunted wing, and Jane would read it for Edmund, and Mary would probably disapprove of the whole enterprise and say so at length.

She turned back to the beginning. Past the frontispiece. Past the title page. To the flyleaf.

The first inscription was older, the ink browned, the copperplate of a hand writing something it meant to last.

To my dear Anne, on the occasion of her sixteenth year. With her father’s love, and his hope that wherever she carries this book, she will know herself beloved.

Below it, in a younger hand, the ink lighter, the letters rounded with the careful flourish of a young hand. Beside the name a small flower, drawn in three strokes — a stem, two leaves, a five-petalled bloom no larger than a thumbnail, the kind drawn without thinking by a young woman who wished a thing to be hers.

Anne Fitzwilliam.

XLII

The Wine Breathes

He had been counting since noon.

Not continuously — the work took him in patches — but underneath all of it the count ran on without his permission. November the twenty-fifth, give or take a day, which was yesterday. She was almost exactly in the middle of her monthly. The damage of the last nine nights was either done by now, or it was not, and he would not know for three weeks — with every chance that other parties would settle the question before he could.

He had not meant to carry this kind of knowledge. He had acquired it at seven, on a stair outside his mother’s difficult confinement, and had come to possess it since with an intimacy he would have preferred to be spared.

Through her courses, he had kept out of the bed but not out of her room — he could not stay out of her presence, not since the night she reached for him and his careful intention to please her without settling his own wants proved as unequal to her as every such intention before it. He had meant to hold to some resolve afterward, to sit with her in the dark and lay no hand on her. It had lasted just long enough for her to push him onto his back. He had been to her bed every night since, and not once had he been able to check himself.

He needed to send her away.

He had been arriving at this conclusion all day, and the reasons for it had only hardened. She had Lizzy now, and the feel of his face, and five months of accumulated evidence, and a mind that had been building the case since July.

And Webb was being traced. The walls were closing from two directions. Any person in this house, when they closed, was a person who could be brought in, held, questioned — and though his wife could not be compelled to testify against him, a woman who had been sharing her husband's bed for weeks could not honestly be thought ignorant of his name. She had the marriage contract; she had the letter to her sister recording that she had never seen his face and had married a man called George Carlisle.

The veil had been her defence.

A child, if she were found to be carrying one when the moment came, would shred that defence entirely. No court in England would believe a wife visibly with child had remained honestly ignorant of the man who had got it on her.

The dark had begun as her protection — the one thing that let her swear she had never seen his face. Somewhere between October and now, it had become something else as well, and that was the part he could least forgive in himself. In the dark, she took what he could give and answered it without hesitation, without the interruption of Fitzwilliam Darcy and all the history attached to him.

In the dark, he could come to her bed and, for a few hours, live inside the disastrous fiction that being known and being recognised were not the same event. He had known the difference from the first night she touched his face after he had broken in her bed, and he had kept returning to it with an appetite that knew better and came regardless.

He had not returned on appetite alone. That would have been simpler, if uglier. He had returned because she was lonely and because he was lonelier; because he had trapped her in a life too narrow for her and could not bear to be the reason she starved inside it; because their whispered suppers and the hours in her bed were the only forms of marriage he could safely offer; because once George Carlisle had begun to matter to her he had not been able to stop hoping that love might do what reason would not — that if she loved George enough, she might someday endure Fitzwilliam Darcy.