Page 115 of Faceless

She took it and put it on. He stood with his back to her.

“How long have you known?”

“Long enough.” She drew her knees up. “I have been sure of it since the night you called me Lizzy. I had proof today.”

He turned. “What proof?”

“Your mother’s book,” she said. “In the library. Anne Fitzwilliam, written in a young woman’s hand, with a small flower beside the name.”

His eyes found her, and then went away. “I did not know it was there.”

“No. I did not suppose you did.”

“Why did you not say something when you suspected?”

“Would you have confirmed my suspicions that I had somehow married a dead man?”

His throat bobbed as he looked cautiously back up to her. “It was not done to… Good Lord, you gave no hint! I thought you… I am a fool! Why would you carry on as if you did not suspect?”

Elizabeth sighed. “When I came here, I thought I might have walked into something monstrous. You were a stranger in the dark, and I had no defence, and I had signed my name to a document that gave you every legal right over me. I was prepared to suffer, and I meant to suffer, if it would spare at least Jane from the same fate.”

“I would never have hurt you!”

“But how was I to know that? I expected… well, then you were not monstrous. From the first hour, you went out of your way to show me I was safe. You never asked for anything I had not already chosen to give. And so, by degrees, I trusted you. And by October, I could not have told you where George Carlisle ended and whoever you really were began, because the man I had come to know was both of them, or neither, and it did not seem to matter anymore.”

He was still. “And?”

“And when I began to suspect…” She was blinking rapidly, and there was a humiliating rush of tears building in her eyes. “By then, I had already given you everything. My name. My body. My trust. If I was right and I had been deceived from the beginning — if you were, indeed, Fitzwilliam Darcy — I had still lain in your arms. That was done. There was no undoing it. So, I said nothing, because I was already lost, and I had made my choice, and I thought perhaps you would tell me yourself when you could.”

He turned away from her.

“But this!” His voice came out stripped of everything, raw and full and entirely undisguised. “Tonight — the entire scene. You could have just told me you knew! Why the seduction, why the trickery? Why the… egad, why did you do that? Why do any of it, if all you wanted was to confirm what you already knew?”

She folded one arm over herself. “Perhaps I wanted one more moment of what I knew I was about to lose.”

He stared. “But you know now, fully, and if anyone ever comes to this house, if they question you, you cannot claim you did not know! Elizabeth, you could be found culpable!” He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, and something that sounded almost like a choked sob shook him.

“Culpable for what, Mr Darcy?”

He sagged. His hand dropped, and he paced a few steps… then stopped, as if recalling he was not wearing breeches and tall boots, stalking about on a Persian rug at Pemberley. He was naked under a sheet, with bare feet on a stone floor.

“There is a warrant. High treason for something I did not do. I staged my own death to make it disappear, and it disappeared, but the man who built the case against me is still working, and there is now an investigation into the circumstances of my ‘death.’ If the Home Office finds me alive — if they find you here knowing — you are not merely my wife. You have harboured a fugitive. You have sheltered a man under attainder, and now you know it. That is not a misunderstanding that resolves itself.”

“So, what does that make me now?”

He turned back. “God help me… I do not know.”

“I am not asking what the law makes of me. I want to know what I am to you.”

“I… I do not unders—”

“What am I?”

The heat in it was real, and she did not try to contain it. “I came here under your name. I slept in your bed. I opened my arms to a dead man’s ghost and called him George and gave him everything a wife gives, because that was what I believed him to be — my husband. My lawful husband.” She held the candle up. “If you are Fitzwilliam Darcy, then George Carlisle does not exist and never did. So, tell me — am I your wife, or am I the whore of a man who was never there?”

“You are my wife!” The words came out hard and fast. “George Carlisle is a fiction, but the Baron of Auchengray is a legitimate title. It belongs to Fitzwilliam Darcy by inheritance through his mother. Both names are mine. And regardless, Scottish law requires only our own avowed words and very little else. The marriage is valid in every particular that the law can be made to recognise, and I will hear no further protests of fraud on that subject.”

His breath came out ragged. “If you wish to be,” he said, and the last four words dropped so quietly she had to hold herself very still to catch them. “If you wish to be my wife.”