Page 116 of Faceless

She heard it. The door he had left open in those four words.

“You gave me an exit,” she said. “Before I even came here. You built it into the offer before I had signed my name.”

His shoulders drooped, and he looked away as he nodded.

“You always meant to let me go. If I wanted it. So, why…”

“I meant to give you a choice.” Something in his voice had gone very quiet. “You had been given very few of them. It seemed the least that was owed to you. But then we…” He shook his head. “It does not matter. The choice is still yours.”

She set the candle down on the table beside her. Her hands were not quite still.

“Why did you marry at all? You could have arranged any number of things without putting yourself at such risk — without putting me in this position. Why marriage?”

He dropped his eyes to the floor. “I heard what was arranged for you.”

“You told me that before. And what of it?”

“And I could not let it come to pass.”

“You could have found a dozen arrangements that did not require making me your wife. You chose marriage. Why?”

When he spoke, it came out low and without defence.

“I had been in this house for three weeks, and I had spoken to no one. Angus brought the post. Mrs MacLeod left meals at the door. I had the mural chamber and the library and four hundred years of other people’s stone around me, and I had done that to myself deliberately, and I had told myself it was necessary, and it was necessary, and I was—” He stopped and ran a hand through his hair, the cold sweat chilling at his temple.

“Well, I told myself I needed a mistress for the house. Someone whose presence would make the household appear inhabited enough to deflect questions. That was the reason I gave myself.”

“Then why me?” she asked. “Of all the women whose situations were desperate — and I assure you there are many — why Elizabeth Bennet?”

He turned away from her.

“I… heard about your father. I knew you — what you had read and what you had argued and what you did when people underestimated you, which was most of the world. I knew you had wit enough to survive humiliation and pride enough to despise being pitied.” His jaw worked once. “I told myself I was saving you from a dangerous marriage. That was true. I told myself I was making a practical arrangement that would serve us both. That was also true.”

He drew breath with difficulty. The plain words were coming out of him slower than the lies ever had.

“But the truth is that I wanted you here,” he said. “Not merely a wife on paper or a mistress to the house. You. Your mind. Your temper. Your company. I put you in the cage I built for myself, and I called it rescue, and I knew what I was doing, and I did it anyway, because I was alone and I wanted you, and company was only the more decent word for it. There is no version of that which is not what it is.”

She held his gaze across the candle — this man, his face in the light, the jaw set and the eyes entirely steady and the whole of him braced for whatever she was going to say — and the anger and the grief and the terrible complicated tenderness of it all moved through her at once, and none of them won.

“So, I was a convenience? Someone to run your household and be company in the dark, and that was the whole of it?”

He looked up. The Hertfordshire face was there — the jaw set hard, the cold pride she had catalogued at Meryton and Netherfield and Rosings as arrogance, the expression she had carried in her memory for eight months as the whole of him. The man in the dark had never shown her that face. The candle had it back at once.

“How can you ask me that?”

“Without very much difficulty, it seems.”

“After everything—” His voice cracked, and he drove over it. “Do you believe I was performing? Four months in this room — do you think any of it was performed?”

“I do not know what to think. I do not know who you are.”

“You know exactly who I am!” The crack was open now, the cold entirely gone from it. “You knew me as I was before, and you have known me in the dark for months, and you know the difference between a man performing and a man destroyed, and I would like to know how you can stand there and ask me that!”

Her throat was very tight.

“And I will ask you the same.” He was fully himself now, the whisper gone and George Carlisle gone and nothing between her and the man underneath. “Every night you reached for me — was that sympathy? Did you open your arms to a man you pitied? Was I something to be endured in the dark while you waited to go home?”

“I was never a prisoner.”