Page 110 of Faceless

She set her glass down with a small click and lifted it again at once, wanting something to do with her hand. “Uncle says he has not felt so hopeful since before last spring.”

“That is good.”

“It is.” She drank, so he did, too. The wine was sitting warm in him now, deeper than he had reckoned.

“An anonymous investor?”

“Anonymous.” She drank again. “The intermediary would not say more. My uncle Gardiner has, of course, every reason to be discreet, and is not asking.”

“Of course.”

She tipped the bottle and poured for them both, slower this time. “Have you any view on it, George?”

“On what?”

“On anonymous investors who appear at remarkably opportune moments and offer remarkably generous terms?”

He drank. “I have no particular view,” he said, “on the conduct of strangers.”

“No. I supposed you would not.”

“Are you displeased about it?”

“I am…” She lifted her glass and drank deliberately. “I am very glad of it. My uncle deserves better than the year he has had.”

“Then I am glad of it as well.”

“Are you?”

The question was mild. He could hear that it was not.

He had stopped, some while back, attending to how much of the wine he had drunk. It was very fine wine, and she had a remarkably steady hand for the pouring of it in the dark, and the second observation seemed to him to belong somewhere in the same ledger as the first without his being able to say quite how.

“There is something,” he said, “that I have been meaning to raise with you. Something that cannot be deferred much longer, and I think tonight—”

He heard her lift the bottle. The deliberate pour. Then the pad of her finger touched his lips — wet with wine, she had been measuring the level in the dark, one finger inside the rim — and she drew it slowly across his mouth and pressed it lightly between his lips, and the cold shock of it went through him to his marrow and every word he had been about to say dissolved entirely.

“Providential,” she whispered. “Do you not think so? All of it. Mary, Lydia, and Uncle Gardiner.” She withdrew her finger and refilled his glass properly, the click of rim against rim. “One extraordinary coincidence after another. I have given up trying to account for it.”

“Elizabeth—”

“I am simply grateful. That is all. I have decided to simply be grateful and not trouble myself with the rest of it.”

His throat tightened. She would not let him speak. Very well. He would listen. Soak her in, let her share her fill. Wait his turn.

She refilled her own glass, the touch of it light against the cloth. “Kitty has taken up drawing.”

He took a sip of wine as he waited for more.

“She is dreadful at it,” Elizabeth said. “Truly, spectacularly dreadful. She sent me a sketch of Falstaff drawn from my own description of him — last week’s letter — that bears more resemblance to a small building than to a dog.” She laughed. “I have had it pinned above the writing table since it came. It is the silliest thing anyone has sent me.”

She reached across the table and found his hand. Her fingers laced into his, unhurried, and he let them.

“She is desperately lonely without Lydia.” Her voice had dropped now, gone gentler. “They drove each other to absolute distraction, and they have not the faintest idea what to do without each other.”

He should say something. He should pull his hand back and say what he had come downstairs to say before the wine and her voice and the warmth of her fingers made the words impossible to find.

“And what else?” she said, with the air of recalling something she had almost forgotten, “Oh, Mama is learning piquet.”