Page 108 of Faceless

Each reason contaminated the next. By the time he reached her door, he could no longer have separated generosity from desire, pity from hunger, hope from cowardice.

And then he had gone to her bed, and gone again. He had told himself, night after night, that he was giving her what comfort he could. The more honest version was that he could not live on the scraps he had left himself any better than she could.

He had to tell her. He had to sit across the table from her tonight and say at least one thing plainly — that she must go to her family, before Christmas, that she must tell anyone who asked that her husband was in Scotland and in good health, that she must not come back. He had to say it and mean it and hold the position when she resisted, because she would resist.

She would not take the offer with open relief. She was too well-bred for that. She would protest — properly, with all the right objections about duty and her place and what was owed between husband and wife — and she would press them with the wit that had been dismantling him since Hertfordshire. But it would be the protest of good manners, not of grief, and he knew her well enough now to tell the one from the other.

She had been good to him these four months. She had borne a marriage no woman could have wanted, borne it with grace, and set herself — visibly, stubbornly — to make some contentment of it, because she was the kind of woman who would. He had expected no less of her. But a contentment one had to work at was not happiness, and he had never mistaken the one for the other. Sending her home would give her back the people she loved, the rooms she knew, a table she could sit down to without first arranging her courage. It would be better for her. It was, beneath everything she would say against it, what she wanted.

She would be happier with her family than she had been here.

Probably.

And he would have to hold the position regardless — not against her objections, which would be the easy part, but against the instinct that had not left him since July, to reach across the table and gather her to him and tell her she was not going anywhere.

He made himself picture it. A closed carriage on the road south, her in it, the wheels on the frozen ground carrying her away from Auchengray while he stood somewhere he could not stand without being seen. Her arriving at her uncle's house in Pentonville without a husband and without an explanation that bore examination. Jane Bennet's face at the door. The questions that would come.

And beneath all of that, worse than all of it, the possibility he could not stop following to its end. If she were already carrying, she would go south not knowing it, would discover it alone in her uncle’s house, would bear his child in a borrowed room with no name she could speak aloud, no face she could show, no word from him that could safely travel. She would do it without him because he had sent her away to protect her, and the protection and the abandonment were the same action, and there was no version of it that did not cost her something he had no right to ask her to pay.

But he could not keep her here. Pregnant or not, the answer was the same. She was too close, and the only reason she had not yet closed her hand on the whole of it was that she had chosen not to — had held what she knew at a distance and not pressed it, a grace she had extended deliberately, and he had recognised it for what it was and repaid her by going to her bed every night with no apparent memory of what was at stake.

He lit the candle and went downstairs.

She had the wine already open when he came in.

He heard the soft knock of bottle against glass, the deliberate pour of a hand that had learned to do this without light, and then she slid the glass towards him across the cloth, her fingers finding his wrist first to place it correctly. He lifted it and drank and the heat of it went deep into his pores in an instant.

“That is very good,” he said.

“Yes.” Her voice carried a warmth she did not bother to hide. “I thought so.”

He drank again. Whatever he needed to say tonight required the clearest possible head. He drank again regardless, because it was very good and because she had given it to him and because small resistances had never yet served him where she was concerned.

“Mrs MacLeod brought it out of the cellar today,” she said. “Madeira, the label says — sixty-three, which I am told is a year of some political distinction, though I claim no expertise. The bottle is larger than the ones we have been getting through, and gave such a good account of itself when she sounded it out that she insisted it merited a more serious approach than the usual supper wine. I had told her I would keep it for Christmas, but she will forgive me, because I had good news today, and a wife who has had good news cannot be expected to wait a whole month to drink upon it.”

“Good news?”

“George.” He could hear the pleasure in it before she had said another word. “Mary is to be married.”

He set down his glass. “Oh?”

“To Mr Peele — do you remember? I mentioned him once. My uncle had thought he might suit her, back in the summer, before everything went sideways, and then the matter was set aside when — well. When things changed.”

“The bookkeeper?”

“The very one.” She drank. “He has done a steady business in shipping insurance from a small office, lives modestly, attends his sister on Sundays, and — by Mary’s own account — has read more sermons than any man currently above ground.”

He lifted his glass and drank. “Mary will keep him in countenance, then.”

“Mary will improve him. He will improve Mary. They are well matched in earnestness.” She refilled her own glass, and the click of the rim was small and exact. “The wedding is to be quiet, in January.”

She lifted the bottle, found the rim of his glass with the back of her finger, and poured. He waited until the sound of it stopped, then drank. The wine had gone down a little easier this time than the first.

“And does Peele know what he is taking on?”

“I should think he does. He has been calling on her for months without saying a word about it to anyone — twice, three times, quietly and properly, nothing announced. He has had ample opportunity to assess her temper.”

“I meant the family.”