Page 117 of Faceless

“Indeed!” he scoffed. “You are too intelligent to believe that. You came here because the alternative was to watch your sister suffer. That made you my captive as surely as a lock and key. And I knew it. I have known it since the day you arrived. You need not despise me for it.” He turned away. “I despise myself enough for the both of us.”

“Do not—”

“You are spared that office.” He said it to the wall. “It is the one useful thing I can still do for you.”

She heard the quaver in his voice — just barely, the full voice breaking at its edge — and then he turned, and she saw his face in the candlelight.

There were tears on it. Not falling, only there, the brightness of them in his eyes, and he made no effort to conceal them because he had apparently gone past concealment entirely. He stood in the light with his face open and the tears on it as plain as the jaw and the cheekbone and the brow she had been mapping in the dark.

She had thought that when she struck the flint, she would feel something like triumph. She had nothing of the kind in her.

The door closed, and she sat alone in the candlelight, her hands in her lap, tears running down her face, with nothing to say and no one left to say it to.

XLV

The Mural Chamber

The mural chamber was cold and dark, and his clothes were on her floor.

He had gone out in nothing but the sheet. The cold did not yet have a real claim on him; the wine was standing between him and it. He stood in the centre of the chamber with the linen around him and the slow, steady tilt of the room refusing to come to rest under his feet.

The candle he had not lit. The fire he had not made. He was standing because he had not yet decided to sit.

His pulse was in his ears. He was aware of it with a clarity he had not had in years — the slow, loud climb of it under his jaw, the matching beat behind his eyes, the wine still moving through him like a tide that had not turned. He had drunk more of it than he had known he was drinking. He had been allowed to. He had been encouraged to.

He had been managed.

He pressed his fingers to his eyes. The pressure of them was its own small mercy.

He could not find it in him to be angry. Then he was angry. The room kept tilting slightly under his feet, and would not lie down.

The wine in him was beginning to tilt the other way. A small early tightening in his temples meant the morning was coming, and the morning was going to have something to say.

He sat down at last on the edge of the cot, the sheet bunched around him, and put his head in his hands, and the wine in his temples beat through his fingers, and the cold of Aberdeenshire stone came up through the soles of his feet, and he waited for the night to do its worst.

She picked his clothes up off the floor before the candle went out.

She did not know exactly when she decided to do it. At some point in the grey before dawn, she had been lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, and she had moved her head too quickly, and the room had moved with it. The wine had decided to make her pay for her cleverness this morning.

She had pushed herself up slowly. Her temples were hammering. Her mouth was sour. The coat was on the floor by the dresser. She did not so much decide to gather his things as find herself doing it.

She had been listening to him use the hidden stair for four months. She knew the sound of it — which step creaked and how long it took him to reach the top and the silence after the door that meant he was back in the mural chamber and she was alone for the night. She had lain in the dark and counted those sounds more times than she had ever told him.

She went up the stair. The door at the top was closed. She knocked, and the small dull sound of her own knuckles on the wood made her wince.

Nothing happened. Then his step, and the door opened, and he was standing in the passage with his eyes red and his hair disordered and the cold of several hours plain on him. He looked like he had not slept either, and the wine was now coming due in him as well.

She held out his clothes.

His eyes went to the bundle. Then to hers. His face did something she was not going to try to read.

“You had better let me in. You have nothing left to hide.”

He stepped back from the door.

The mural chamber was cold and dark — no candle, no fire, nothing — and she set his clothes on the table and turned to face him. The grey pre-dawn light from the ventilation slit was thin and unkind, and they stood in it and held each other’s eye for the first time in daylight. They both looked, she thought, exactly as terrible as they felt.

“Fitzwilliam.”